In addition to the Craig Stitt stuff: https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/38a31eda-317f-4735-8899-331f6672c463 You might have to dig through the page source to get the best quality versions (unless they add download buttons..?)
Positives versus negatives of organised versus community led preservation. I'm leaning towards the latter ...
I don't want to go to war with anyone... but for fuck's sake, it's been ten months... what we have on our wikis is available to everyone... I just don't understand these delays... in just a few days we've made two Sega Channel exclusives available to everyone... why don't they do the same?
10 months would be fine, in reality it's been much longer for some of that stuff which has been hinted at for years, Hopefully I've got a few years left in me yet, just a shame for those that didn't (none of us are getting any younger). Edit: Fuck it, the more I think about this the more I want to write an article about it; the fans who spend their time and money on this hobby and release their knowledge for free versus those who try to make a career out of the donations that should be going to the dedicated fans who in many cases go out of pocket in order to share their findings. It reminds me in many ways of the huge issues in anthropology, where discoveries of fossils are so rare that finders often refuse to allow access to other researchers whilst also failing to publish any papers themselves, oftentimes for decades. This isn't aimed at anyone in particular, and I welcome dissenting opinions ahead of any publication.
I've been trying to donate some Sega paperwork/relics I've picked up to the VGHF for years. All my emails are ignored. Messaged Frank on Discord, no response either. He's probably just busy, and I can't imagine running the VGHF is easy. But it's very discouraging. And... not knowing is killing me. I hope I didn't offend him. Do any wiki members own a nice scanner? That can handle small books/etc?
You're right... I'm already 44... I hope to live another few years... but I can predict the future, so I'd better keep my mouth shut... I have one that I bought just to scan five Mega Drive manuals that we didn't have at the time (and it's gathering dust in the house)... but we live a long way from each other...
If you don't mind sending to the UK I can scan them. If you want them scanned properly then scanning bound stuff will be destructive, but I can try to scan without debinding although the quality will obviously be reduced.
Do it. Let's be mavericks. Turn Retro into something more. We've got your back. Destructive is fine As long as you have professional-ish experience doing this comprehensively, I fully trust you. But given you're in the UK, let me explore my US options before those shipping costs. Plus... it'd be useful to maintain a small list of Retro members with scanning capabilities.
I'm not professional, but I've done a lot of scanning on it (I can always send you the raw scans to edit yourself). And yeah, sending books overseas isn't cheap, as I've just experienced from Australia ($50), so it's obviously better if you can find someome in the US. Did I ever mention that my thoughts on scanning align with Cato the Elder's opinion on Carthage?
Thanks, but will probably be an Op-Ed elsewhere (if anyone will take it), I think Retro should be unbiased, so not really an appropriate place for an opinionated Op-Ed like that.
What did come up a few months/years ago, is that some professional outfits will charge extra for an OCR layer (i.e. PDF/A instead of PDF). This can be done entirely for free using Tesseract. That's what archive.org uses, and is what I've been using for the last couple of years. It's a tiny bit awkward to set up, but feed me a PDF and I can OCR it.
