Topic: Out Of Print Archive - download full videogame magazines from the nineties

Strictly speaking it's still copyright infringement.

But as Adamant mentioned we don't accept any kind of donations besides straight up magazines, which are then scanned for preservation.
We have strict guidelines of which magazines we will and which we won't scan. To keep it simple, almost everything after the year 2000 won't get scanned.
This is to send a clear message to publishers that we are not here to do harm of any kind.
This is a labour of love and nothing more. The only intention we have is to preserve these wonderful video game magazines because as we all know sooner or later it will be impossible to get a hold of them in any kind of way.

We do indeed contact or at least try to contact publishers to let them know what we are doing and when possible to get permission, which isn't always a clear cut case.
We have certain people in the industry who are 100% behind us, one of them will be revealed this very week in the new Friday update.
Then we have others who can't publicly endorse us for various reasons, but love what we do.
As well as a very big name who is waiting for the correct time to go public with his endorsement of what we are doing.
I wish I could go into more detail there, but for obvious reasons I can't. When they give the go ahead, we follow. When they don't think the time is right, we stay silent and wait patiently.

Some publishers seem to simply ignore us, at least for now, even though we sent them letters explaining what we are all about.
That doesn't mean that we won't keep trying to get approval of some sort from them though.
It might just be a matter of contacting the right person at the right time.

A huge reason for us starting our own site was that we wanted to do this the right way and not just be a "rom site for magazines" so to speak, which others don't seem to have a problem with but we do.
We have nothing but respect for the people who work(ed) on these magazines and so we won't do anything to put their livelihood in jeopardy.
And we want to present their work in such a way that would do it justice.

As mentioned before, we don't get and more importantly don't want a single cent for the work we do.
Everything comes out of our own pockets, with the exception of magazines that have been donated by some extremely kind people. Richard Leadbetter for instance, who donated his personal issues of MAXIMUM to us for preservation.
But also another Richard, this time from Holland who donated over 350 UK magazines.

Sounds great, man! Like some others have said, I'd be really excited about reading some N64 Magazine or old Nintendo Powers (although I imagine since Nintendo Power is still around you probably couldn't get away with posting old issues). I think this is a really cool idea, though, and I hope it takes off.

Thanks.

To show that we really do listen to what people want to see, just take a look at this which I won yesterday: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2804...

It might be a while before I start working on those issues though, as I'm overwhelmed by the amount of magazines I'm working on right now. Super Play, Official Sega Saturn magazine, MAXIMUM, CVG, and I just scanned in the first 4 issues of Mean Machines this past week.
The scanning doesn't take that much time when looking at the overall picture, but the editing process is extremely time consuming as you can see from the highest resolution magazines we've got up.

Depending on the state the magazine is in it can go from cleaning up dust particles and straightening pages to digitally restoring the yellowed white backgrounds and text or faded black ones.
Combine this with scratches that run though text and images which need to be removed in a way that makes it look like they never were there to begin with.
Also scanning of most magazines needs at least two passes, once from the left and once from the right, with sometimes even the bottom strips that need to be scanned in separately since the magazines are too big to fit on a normal size scanner.
So editing 4 scans into one seamless page also takes quite a bit of work.

I have a feeling I'm starting to ramble here so I won't put you guys and girls to sleep with all these boring technicalities.

Oh wow, 51 issues of my fave magazine ever, nicely done sir. I shall look forward to reading them all cover to cover, all over again. Keep up the good work.

No Nintendo Power? Lame

Why focus on something that has been done to death over these past couple of years by others, when at the same time a huge number of cult favourite magazines have been all but ignored? ;p

So, do you have any interest in providing scans of Scandinavian magazines? That would be what I'd be the most interested in

That's a very good question.
We do have an international section planned for the future as I have quite a few Japanese Neo Geo Freak magazines as well as several Japanese Sega Magazines for instance.

But right now we are concentrating on English language magazines as they are a bit further reaching than Scandinavian or Dutch, which is what I personally speak.
I have a lot of Dutch gaming magazines as well from back in the day, but I'm afraid there would be very little interest in them compared to the legendary UK mags.

Which cbz reader do you use? I tried Comical v0.8, and it couldn´t read the file...

I'm using Comicbooklover myself, but I'm on a Mac.
For Windows you should be having no problems with either ComicRack or CDisplay.
So weird that Comical is giving you problems, but I've never used it before. Hadn't even heard about it actually.

Well, Comical was the first one I tried, and it´s only a 0,8 version. CDisplay works just fine, thanks for the help!

Ah, that's a relief.