A bit different https://twitter.com/SEGAForever/media The Sega Forever twitter occasionally posts high quality artwork from older Sega games. We have some of it, but not others. Any art that isn't fan-made and/or crap needs mirroring. Unless you can source even higher quality versions. Sega and its (former) developers often post useful things on Twitter - I've never kept on top of it all.
NGC Magazine https://archive.org/details/ngc_magazine I'm thinking about grabbing some of these scans and putting them onto Retro CDN solely for the Sega game (p)reviews as I was thinking about this mag while I've been plotting down all the (p)reviews for Sega games from Nintendo Official Magazine. I could upload only the ones that have at least one Sega game covered, or as many of them as possible. I also found scans of issues 1, 2 and 33 of NOM's successor Official Nintendo Magazine UK, and I thought they would be good to put up, especially issue 1 as they have a "Rated" section with the top 50 rated GameCube/DS/GBA games with a good few Sega games included (e.g. Billy Hatcher, Gunstar Super Heroes, Monkey Ball 1 & Jr.)
A... generic warning to be careful about Nintendo items and ensure they can be justified and used vs. just bulk hosting.
Yeah, I'm aware that Nintendo can have...quite the iron fist on how items related to them can be used, which is why I would limit myself on which ones I can upload. I don't think NGC Magazine was one of the magazines that had official endorsement from Nintendo so that could be fair game, but I can play it safe with them. And also with ONM by only uploading its first issue. Worse comes to worst, I would just put the review data from it onto Sega Retro as placeholders.
https://retrocdn.net/Category:Hobby_Consolas_scans Some of our Hobby Consolas scans are wrong. Between issue 5 and issue... something, the page numbers go wacky at the half way mark. I think we're missing posters - 8 or 16 pages worth per issue, so in the absense of scans, we need to add placeholders to keep the page numbers normal. Originally I thought it was a typo because the change in numbers happens mid-review, but if you were going to put posters in a magazine, you'd want them in the middle where the staple is. Problem: These PDFs are... questionable. Using our set of tools you can extract each JPEG page, but about half of them come out upside down and all have big borders. Whatever software was used to convert these into PDFs must have been rotating and "cropping" in the document itself. It makes the task really awkward and I want to push it onto someone else.
It's the magazine's fault. They shouldn't have added page numbers to the posters, but that's just me. Anyway, I'm downloading them now, the cropping will take some time though. ^^ Edit: Ugh. Honestly, fuck it. These are JP2 files (?), maybe that's why you couldn't extract them properly. Besides that, the pdf already uses placeholders and looks okayish to me. Can we just leave that for another time? xD Edit2: Oh, wait, actually this is fine. Give me a sec. Edit3: I'm sorry, but I have to pass. It's not like with those French magazines where every issue came as a bunch of loose jpgs and everything was a mess. Hobby Consolas is fine imo. The missing posters will probably pop up sometime in the future.
Page numbering, part 2: https://retrocdn.net/Category:Video_Games_scans Video Games (Germany). We rely on this one a lot more - pages are missing from most(?) of the earlier issues, which I didn't realise until fairly recently. I can't guarantee I won't do this job myself at some point, but, these PDFs were originally compiled in a slightly strange way. There are 2-colour black and white pages in many of these, which when extracted with our program, come out as Netpbm files. I haven't got a nice tool to deal with this format - I'd have to convert to JPEG, which ups the file size (and reduces the quality of the image, though given they already suck, I'm less bothered about that) and more importantly, is a faff. Do we have a tool that will insert blank pages do I can save a few steps? Unless of course someone has actual scans.
From the first 50: 1 3 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 missing 22 25 27 missing 28 29 32 33 34 missing 35 40 41 45 48 missing I blame my younger self for not checking things.
And every single issue of Video Games up until July 1998 is also wrong. For those playing at home, that's 7 years' worth of magazines. Eek. Most of these seem to be single page supplements so we're not actually missing any content from the magazine itself, but it's still tedious.
Axel Springer España (Axel Springer SE Group) who owns the rights to Hobby Consolas has been threatening to take legal action against whoever hosts its magazine ... all Spanish websites who hosted it in the past have already removed the links for download ... so I doubt that new scans would pop up anytime soon... those scans at archive.org are the only ones available and that collection is incomplete... no offense... I'm just spreading the word... How? ... because when I drag and drop the PDFs onto the batch file nothing happens... I used to extract them here when there was no size limit for the files that you could upload there, but now they impose us a 25 MB limit to lure people into buying their shitty "Pro Version"...
For what it's worth, I typically use https://www.4dots-software.com/free-pdf-image-extractor/ for extraction. I did run into a case recently where I had to upsample, then extract for some stuff that was in TOSEC-PIX, bit that's definitely the exception and not the rule.
So Marukatsu Famicom had a Sega section too ... Marukatsu Sega covered the Master System late 1987, presumably later covered the Mega Drive until the launch of Marukatsu Mega Drive.
Probably a reminder to myself, but others can jump in: Xbox Series X I've mirrored super high resolution promotional images of the Xbox Series X|S on Retro CDN. Because why not. But I suppose you can't do one without the others. There are lot of press discs with official material for older systems: https://archive.org/details/redump-id-71972 https://archive.org/details/redump-id-71958 https://archive.org/details/redump-id-71973 https://archive.org/details/redump-id-71975 https://archive.org/details/redump-id-71955 https://archive.org/details/redump-id-71953 https://archive.org/details/redump-id-71943 https://archive.org/details/redump-id-71140 https://archive.org/details/redump-id-58247 and there are Nintendo ones floating around somewhere. The barrier for entry with this task is quite high - there's converting, optimising, renaming and uploading the useful things in sensible places to consider. But you can help by pointing out ones I've missed.
Bleh. https://retrocdn.net/Category:Press_files Coming to an internet near you - an easy-to-access set of official console photos. Reaquaint yourself with the wacky pink GameCube that never happened, the PlayStation 3 with more ports on the back than sense, and the apparently radioactive versions of the original Xbox. I'm not going to pretend I've looked into this closely, but it seems that the 20GB PS3 is more valuable to collectors than the 60GB model now. It was sold in fewer markets and was dead within a couple of years. Pay attention, digital PS5.
Special mention to what has almost become PSP Retro™. Because for whatever reason, the PSP is very well represented on archive.org. Fun fact: I had genuinely forgotten the "PSP Street" existed until a few hours ago, and I'm meant to care about these things. It was released a month before the Vita - we talk about the PS3 having a troubled launch but at least I remember it launching.
I remember the Street. But only because it was hacked in person at the event it was announced at WITH video footage. Didn't know it was a month before the Vita though.
Got some Sega Entertainment press releases: https://web.archive.org/web/20180124003659/http://www.sega-entertainment.jp/information.html https://www.sega-entertainment.jp/information.html We probably need a plan on how to handle these. Sega haven't been consistent with their naming, and I don't understand most of the contents.
https://archive.org/details/@gamemags1957 He's back Dreamcast Monthly! DC-UK! Dreamcast Magazine! Dreamcast Solutions! Game Zone! UK GamePro! Games Domain Offline! Other things!
