Random: This Incredible Super NES Manual Archive Will Get You All Nostalgic

The absolute irony of digitising physical manuals to preserve them!

Absolutely love this

Anyone else getting a malware warning when visiting the site?

"
malware website warning
The website you are trying to access is known to host malware and poses a security risk to your computer and network. Please contact your IT help desk to review if you are impacted.
If you think you are receiving this message in error, please contact your IT help desk.
URL : snesmanuals.com/"

I had a fun time going through some manuals earlier. I'm glad people are putting in the time to save these pieces of gaming history.

Pilotwings one is cool, it has a Flight Membership Card where you can put your details and a photograph!

The Lawnmower Man instruction manual says look out for The Lawnmower Man 2 game on Super Nintendo which is interesting as it never came out.

@hypercoyote I use an AdBlocker📱 and had no pop-up warnings.

@BlueGBAMicro I use Adblock (not plus). It wasn't an Adblock popup, it was from a redirect through Akamai.

Edit: I think it must be related to my company's network. I tried it on my phone off WiFi and it works fine. I've never seen anything like this error before though 🤷‍♂️

FINALLY! Now I can check out some manuals that I could never find on the internet.

This is honestly something that should be a part of the NSO App officially.

Preferably Nintendo should combine all the NSO Consoles into one NSO Archives App. Just give us all the platforms + catalogues we want on competent legal proprietary emulators i.e. with rewind, fast-forward, turbo, more save states, downloadable/uploadable/transferrable community shared saves, cheats, scanned game manuals, multiple suspend play, custom button-mapping, online netplay with crosschat, lobbies, invites, filters, borders/themes and/or widescreen adaptation etc... most of which is already included in some notable free emulators out in the wild for some time now. It would be better if this was all contained in one giant categorized “Nintendo Switch Online Archives/Virtual Console App” rather than segmented with separate apps for each platform.

… Wun can only hope.

@wuntyme8 Agree, should be available with the NSO games.
I really liked it when 3DS had all the manuals on the carts.

Cool! Sadly it won't last long until Nintendo takes them down. They took down that SM64 scan a few months ago and they can do it again with these ones. Better salvage these while we still can.

@Jacoby @wuntyme8 The mini consoles at least have QR Codes that linked you to instruction manuals. NSO doesn’t even have that.

It is hard to play some of the NSO games without instructions on the controls. I shouldn’t have to look up each game on my own.

@wuntyme8 It is puzzling that on the Wii U Virtual Console we only got scans of the original manuals for Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS games, as well as the Wii Download Versions, but I think they don't work anymore in North America (at least, when I try to see them, they don't load). A close option is the digital EarthBound guide that was available on a website back when the game was released on the Wii U Virtual Console.
Then, for the NES and SNES Classic Editions they offered downloadable pdfs of the original manuals, including the aforementioned complete guide of EarthBound and the letter for StarTropics.

And now on the NSO apps they don't offer them again beyond the downloadable EarthBound guide, again. Those should be available to be read during gameplay within the apps.

Closing in 3...2...1.

This is great, as someone who got the SNES experience through hand-me-downs we pretty much only had the carts, and never had an idea of what the manuals were like.

Now if someone would still have the old websites archived for the DS/Wii era, there used to be localization interviews for "Another Code: R" on the UK Nintendo site and it's offline now. It would be really interesting to read them again.

Look at this https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Wii/Another-Code-R-A-Journey-into-Lost-Memories-280517.html

It's just a blank page, it's even been excluded from the wayback machine.

@SmashFan347 Nintendo won't be able to take all of them down since not all game manuals are from Nintendo.

I really love manuals. Removing them kind of cheapened the product and I still haven't gotten over it yet.

Ok, the URL in the article is a redirect to https://sites.google.com/view/snesmanuals

Almost sexual, isn't it Smithers?

I already have loads of manuals downloaded as PDFs for various systems, but I’ll be taking a download of these to make sure it covers any gaps I have.

One of the definitions of being a geek has to be getting excited about downloading a bunch of PDF files! 😀

@GravyThief except you’re not being a geek, you’re just downloading a load of pdfs to your hard drive that you’ll never look at like countless other people. A real geek would collect the physical manuals themselves.

There's no reason to "cut costs" on something there's a market for. If a game is likely to sell half a million copies or more physically, odds are good that if you put a paper insert in each advertising a special order manual for an extra $5-10, probably at least 5% buy them. However, they want to encourage people to buy digitally instead since they make more money per unit that way.

Download it, now, before it's gone for good.

@Orokosaki thanks for taking an interest in what I do, I really appreciate it.

I do read many of them. I have them all on my phone, and every time I play a retro game (which is 95% of what I play considering how uninspired modern games are), if I have the manual there, I read it.

As for only real geeks collecting the physical manuals. I think what you mean is only real geeks with lots of disposable income and space would collect the physical manuals, considering there are over 800 for US SNES alone. And they’d also have to have unusual collecting tastes, to collect only the manuals.

So I’ll stick to being a geek (with cash to spare for certain complete in box games) reading my PDF manuals, cheers.