Get Info: #scans

T&E SOFT 3D Golf Simulation Series Dokuhon (1993/04/30)

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a Special Appendix that came with the 1993-04-30 issue of Japanese magazine Theスーパーファミコン (The Super Famicom)

This guide book shows tips for all 18 holes on each the four T&E SOFT golf games available on SNES:

Harukanaru Augusta
Pebble Beach no Hatou
Waialae no Kiseki
Devil’s Course

These courses were also featured in games on other platforms so the guide has much broader usefulness.

SkateBoarder Magazine

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

SkateBoarder Magazine (1964–1980) scans at Internet Archive, these include pages missing from the official website.

Here’s a quick link to the famous Dogtown articles in these specific 9 issues: 2-2/5/6, 3-2/4/5/6, 4-1, 5-7

EPOCH Instruction Manuals

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A recent friendly nudge from Jason Scott at the Internet Archive let me know that somebody had lost their manual for their 1981 Epoch Cassette Vision and tweeted EPOCH to see if they could help. But EPOCH did more than that, spending time to scan and upload manuals for all of their vintage consoles!

Mirroring these at Internet Archive was a nice bite-sized task to help burn off some of the Christmas fat and get things moving again over here. I went about it as follows (high level information only, comment or @ me on twitter if you’d like to know more):

Download all PDFs locally using jDownloader (total=240)
Copy titles from Japanese listing, store in a file
DeepL translate Japanese titles to English, store in a second file
Write shell script to loop through filenames and collate titles etc into CSV ready for batch upload
Check CSV for errors and fix (there were mistakes in the original Japanese titles and/or DeepL translation)
Test batch upload using a single file, tweak script
Do the full batch upload using ia CLI tool
Confirm any failures, fix and reprocess those in a second pass

My script ended up like this:

After the first pass there were only a few errors: 2 corrupt PDFs that needed to be uploaded manually, 2 duplicate identifiers that I had failed to spot looking through the translations, and 1 identifier that had trailing spaces that I had missed during my finessing of the titles. Pretty good going, though!

They’re now accessible at: archive.org/search.php?query=identifier%3Aepoch-manual%2A

Have fun & stay safe!

PC Engine Fanatics, Console Ma’zine, Electric Brain & Games Amusement Pleasure

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This collection is a British video game fanzine/magazine that ran from 1989 to 1993 for an almost uninterrupted total of 35 issues.

The first 8 issues went by the name PC Engine Fanatics which was a hand made fanzine/newsletter that was promoted in period magazines. The following 10 issues received a name change to Console Ma’zine along with expanded coverage of Sega’s Mega Drive, Atari’s Lynx, and Nintendo’s Game Boy as well as NEC’s PC Engine. The “final” 17 issues went by the name Electric Brain (taken from the Chinese word for computer) and it was during this run that, at least for a brief handful of issues, the fanzine turned into a proper magazine that was available to purchase from major newsagents on the high street.

After Electric Brain there was a year silence until GAP (Games Amusement Pleasure) followed for one last 5 issue finale, by which time the Internet had started to go mainstream and editor Onn Lee’s momentum finally waned after more than 15 magnificent years.

This publication is little known even in its native United Kingdom, but it is notable for featuring an English translation of an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto from the time of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past_. This interview was next translated into English over 20 years later. There was a wiki page about these publications, but it fell victim to deletionists—but that’s a story for another day.

I’d like take this opportunity to thank Andy Harris for loaning me the majority of his collection of issues so I could scan and share the complete run rather than my few issues. I tracked him down a couple of years ago and thankfully managed to persuade him I wasn’t trying to steal his stuff! Thanks for trusting me Andy.

Enjoy!

archive.org/search.php?query=%22electric+brain%22+%22Onn+Lee%22&sort=titleSorter

Atari ST: Music Software Manuals

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I scanned these a while ago, but dealing with a troll in an online Atari ST community made me forget about them for a while. Not out of spite, but more because I don’t have time for toxic people so I just dropped what I was doing and changed direction when I encountered this particular person. Remember: be excellent to each other! Be nice.

Anyway! Three manuals were scanned from my ring binder hard copies, as always they are uploaded to Internet Archive as Searchable PDFs:

Cubeat 2.0 (338 pages)
Notator Alpha 1.1 (258 pages)
Notator SL/Creator SL 3.1 (770 pages)

Plus a disk image and zip of the relatively rare Cubeat 2.0:

Cubeat 2.0 Disk (720kb)

The BeOS Bible

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I spent a few hours last night unbinding The BeOS Bible (1999, @ScotHacker) using a hairdryer and putting it through a feed scanner, making light work of 994 pages!

The resulting 100MB Searchable PDF is now on @InternetArchive & @OpenLibrary #preservation https://t.co/b8ypsCNHwZ pic.twitter.com/vN1cQ487OO
— Matt Sephton🎴 (@gingerbeardman) November 11, 2020

POPEYE Big 100th issue (1981-04-10)

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a special 100th issue of POPEYE a Japanese lifestyle “Magazine for City Boys”: archive.org/details/popeye-magazine-for-city-boys-1981-04-10/mode/2up

Only very minor game related things in this, but I thought it worth posting. There’s a Game & Watch as a selectable reward/prize in a competition by Puma. Plus a “how to” for Hanafuda (the reason I bought the issue) and reviews of various physical card games. Plus lots more besides!

If you don’t have time to flick through 276 pages, then I created a twitter thread that summarises the most interesting stuff: twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/1235585813137756161

“Game Machine” magazine archive

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

343 issues of Japanese arcade magazine GAME MACHINE spanning 1974/08 to 1988/12: https://onitama.tv/gamemachine/archive.html

Mirrored as one archive: https://archive.org/details/game-machine And as a collection at: https://archive.org/details/game_machine_magazine_jp

Interesting issues:

Yoshikazu Endo honors Special Issue (No. 72 May 15, 1977) https://archive.org/details/game-machine-magazine-19770515p Invaders boom heyday (No. 117 April 15, 1979) https://archive.org/details/game-machine-magazine-19790415p Video game machine Special Issue (No. 201 November 29, 1982) https://archive.org/details/game-machine-magazine-19821129p Thanks to the fine folks at ONION software / onitama and Amusement Press Inc. for making these available. The scans are well done with OCR selectable/searchable Japanese text.

I took some time to mirror the collection at the Internet Archive. Enjoy!

Update, May 2023: A further 269 issues of Japanese arcade magazine GAME MACHINE spanning 1991/01 to 2002/06 have been uploaded to Internet Archive, which brings the current total to 612!