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[meppi]

I'm feeling a lot better now, thanks.

It was a viral infection that kept me in bed for most of the time over the course of several weeks.
Didn't want to call in sick so I went to work anyway, which only made it worse and ended up drawing out the recovery time.

Besides the neighbors from hell, I'm fine now.
Today, after doing 4 days of the night shift and then switching to my last day with the late shift (which results in only 4 hours of sleep), they start banging on the walls and tearing down their stairs at 5.30AM!

I was furious and cussed them out really good and then put my foot against the door and kicked it shut as hard as I could, resulting in the neighbors 2 houses down probably waking up as well.
Guess they got the message and stopped for a bit, only to start again at 8AM since that's the time I can't file a complaint with the cops or anything.

I've got my home theater blasting away techno CDs and have put the subwoofer against their wall, while I listen to podcasts on my laptop with my headphones on.
Once in a while their noise still comes through. :-/
Can't wait till I have enough money to sell this place and buy something nice...

[meppi]

Besides working on the second chapter of a secret project, I've also been busy on Super Play issue 5, which is giving me quite a bit of trouble I must say.

Nothing that can't be fixed, but it sure it time consuming.

Take a look at this one. Spent the better part of 2 hours restoring this page.
This kind of damage is very annoying to correct since it's so dense.

http://www.outofprintarchive.com/GIF/SuperPlay5-73.gif

The gif is about 5MB big, so give it a bit of time to load completely.
Also, as always don't mind the artifacting since it's just the nature of converting jpgs to gif.

[Addicted to Chaos]

Hmm, looking at your last post upload, I really don't know were you get your motivation and why you don't just cave in and look for a better magazne issue (well, besides money being a problem on top of finding a batter condition mag, of course.... I know I'd proabaly have the patience to wait, lol)). But then again, it seems you slowed down with the releases (didn't check the dates yet, but it seems like you've fallen off the heavy duty almost every week release). But if it is demotivation of some sort, I don't blame you one bit. Don't burn yourself out.. because then guys like me are screwed!!

... But there is apparently a Secret Project that started in my absense, so this may very well kept you busy otherwise?... and this Project doesn't have the norm pages scanned & edited type deal, meaning maybe it's not a magazine scan? But whatever, no hints needed...


I also seen the April Fool OoPA participated in at Sega Saturn UK forum yesturday for the first time while checking older posts (just very recently joined there... it's about time I joined a great Saturn forum/fansite), and I must say "WHAT A DAM TEASE THAT WAS!!!!" And wow, if only that was true. But whatever...

[meppi]

Yeah, I'm having a bit of a rough time as of late to keep my motivation level up.

I've started working on magazines again, but it's harder to get back than I thought.
Work isn't helping either with the rotating shifts and all.

The problem with those kinds of edits is that most of the magazines I have are in just about as good a condition that you'd be able to find. Even if you buy a collection of "mint" issues which there are, you're bound to find these kinds of problems in them.
So there's little I can do about it, besides fix them or buy a dozen other copies with no guaranty of the quality, only knowing that I'll lose a lot more money in the process. :-/

The secret project is indeed also magazine related and requires just as much work as the other issues I'm working on, so that certainly played a part in upping the workload combined with a weekly schedule.
It had to crack sooner or later.

Like I already mentioned before, I'm just trying to get back into a state of mind where I can spend my vacation putting some good work into the process and not be burned out completely, thus wasting 2 full weeks.
Only have a week and a half of work left, so I'm hoping I'll make it in time.

Hope you guys can be a bit more patient till then...

[Addicted to Chaos]

I say take all the time off you need, always, so don't even think twice about resting the whole time during your vacation. Beause the way I see it, anything is better than you eventually snapping and never returning to this again. As long as you stick with this, it all good news to me. I've always say I have no idea how you manage to stay so motivated, and that doesn't mean you have a reputation to keep, but that you should slow down.

What you said that last paragraph is very right. You do have to find that very comfortable pace.

And this is supposed to be a work of passion, not something that should feel like your forced to do. So if it feels like the second, then that's definately not good and you will burn out.

But whatever, I still got your backlog of mags your allready posted to go through again all the time, anytime, anyways (like me and OSSM righ now). As just like with RPGs, it's impossible to remember most of what you've read. And it's not like I read every single page every time eighter that could be read in current, if not another pass through a mag.


Well, be sure you enjoy your vacation and unwind enough before you get back to work.

[meppi]

If you aren't seeing much change in the updates in the first post, don't worry.
It doesn't mean that I'm not working on anything.

I'm actually preparing quite a few magazines at this time.
The thing is that between scanning and editing there are quite a few more steps that need to be taken, which don't get updated, otherwise the OP would get very messy and I would spend too much time updating every single thing.

Since all scans are being done by scanning every page from multiple angles, they need to be put back together, then be adjusted so they nice and straight, after which they are ready to be cropped.
Only when all this is done can the real editing and restoring part begin.

So since this in-between process takes about 3-4 hours per 100 pages, it adds a bit of down-time so to speak in regards to updates on the main post.

[RedTop]

Take your time Meppi, still plenty of catching up to do in regards to reading the mags you put out before.

[meppi]

Thanks.

I've been making some good progress this week, but it won't show very quickly I'm afraid.
A lot of pure scanning as well as joining everything back up which doesn't directly result in new magazines on the site itself.

But on the other hand, I used to do this in between magazines which caused a lot of timing problems since it's not a quick and dirty scan job to begin with.
That being said, if I'm able to get a nice advantage on the stacks and stack of magazines I need to scan, once I have a sufficient bunch of them scanned and joined, I can get to work the pure restoration part without getting side-tracked.
So that should be a good thing.

Been thinking about the viability to create separate i-device versions as well.
Not sure how many people that would actually benefit, but I'd like to throw those thoughts out there anyway.
After all it's pretty silly to put a 250MB cbz in 1920p on a device with limited memory and a screen that only supports up to 960p or 1024p...

[sblack]

Hi Meppi,

Nice to hear from you, I see your enjoying your well earned break Anyway my personal thoughts are, to continue scanning at 1920p as you will be future proof (is that the right?), so you will not have to rescan everything again 
Thats what I think.

[triverse]

With more and more publishers moving towards portables in one way or another, I think offering releases in portable format is a good way to "stay ahead of the curve" so to speak.  Rather than just doing the same old releases, we have focused on stuff not available elsewhere and are looking forward to the future, where ever that may be, for releases.

[meppi]

Hi Meppi,

Nice to hear from you, I see your enjoying your well earned break Anyway my personal thoughts are, to continue scanning at 1920p as you will be future proof (is that the right?), so you will not have to rescan everything again 
Thats what I think.

Oh, don't worry. We wouldn't dream of dropping the high-rez versions.

So we will certainly continue scanning with the 1920p goal in mind.
Note that this still is not the full size of the scans, but from the test I've done even a couple of months ago, releasing the magazines at their full scan resolution is just a bit much for todays systems and technology.
When we get super high def screens and all home systems are equipped with 5TB drives, we will consider doing so.
As of right now, 1920p magazines are somewhere between 150 and 300MB per issue.
If we were to begin releasing them at their original resolution you'd end up with 500MB+ issues which would cause a bit of trouble, not just for storage but also for distribution.

Vacation is sadly coming to an end for me.
I wish I could have used it to do more work on the magazine side of things, but this past week I've been doing nothing but coding everything on the site to get ready for the iDevice support that we've been planning. Not to mention getting all the iDevice versions ready and linked up.

Gonna head back to work on Monday, so I'll be busy for a week or two, but after that I have another 2 week vacation coming up and I'm planning to make the best of those.

[meppi]

Things are taking a bit more time right now so please bear with us.

Besides having the two kittens to take care of, play with and give lot of attention too, there is also the incredible amount of games released this past month or so, along with the new 360. and Mario Kart is released this week! 
On top of that I'll have less time due to the timetables at work changing for me.
On the one hand it's for the better as I should be losing the zombie shifts, but on the other hand, I'll be sleeping longer...

So even though I'm doing whatever I can to edit pages left and right and believe me, I want to finish the next OSSM issue as quickly as possible, it's not going very fast at the moment.
Hope things will pick up when everything settles down over here and I find my rhythm back somewhat.
But right now I feel like I'm not getting much done of anything tbh.

[meppi]

Feels like things are going very slow, but I've actually made some good progress with actually scanning in more magazines.
Editing them has taken a bit of a backseat these past few weeks as I somehow get more work done scanning during my vacation than editing.
Probably because I get distracted more easily when I'm editing.

And in the end, you can't edit magazines that haven't been scanned in.
Gonna use the coming weekend to scan in OSSM 7-11 as far as I can as well as joining as many pages as possible.

Also been working through Dreamcast issue 2, but as it's a very complex magazine to edit, it's also one that it's easy to burn out on.
So I'm going to be jumping between magazines to keep that from happening.
Love the magazine, but editing it at this level is quite a task. Not giving up though.

[meppi]

While working on Sega Pro 3 I thought to myself just how easy it was to edit this magazine as it took between 5 and 10 minutes on average unlike other magazines, which can have pages take up till 30 minutes each to restore.

Then I came across one page that I just knew was going to give me a headache...

Three and a half hours later we ended up with the following result:

[Nreive]

That's some nice work there, meppi. Well done.

[meppi]

Thanks.

Had to use some really sneaky tricks to get it looking like new again.
Wasn't one of the hardest ones, but certainly not one of the easiest ones as well.
Don't know why, but this one was especially fun to do. 

[meppi]

A bit of good news.
I was able to do some nice work this past weekend as well as this week, so I'm very confident that we'll have something really nice for you to read coming Friday. 

[meppi]

As I had been working quite a bit on Sega Pro 4, I thought that I would probably be able to finish it this weekend.

But then I came across the following:



Needless to say, this will take quite a few hours to restore, so I'm afraid a release for this week is not in the books. 

[meppi]

Hmmm, it looks like we'll have to look for another copy of this magazine as the damage is a bit too widespread on this particular page.
Normally I can use other sections for the restoration of a certain percent of damaged estate.
But in this case, there's barely anything left that I can use as the damage spreads over 80% of the page.

Back to square one I'm afraid.

[meppi]

Been enjoying my last couple of days of vacation a bit too well I think.
Well besides the terrible news of Psygnosis being closed down by Sony and Nintendo Power stopping publication this winter.

But yeah, taking it a bit easy, so I'm not close to finishing the next issue right now.
What I have been doing though, and I'll continue for the next couple of days is to scan as many issues as possible in the days I have left and start rejoining the pages.
That way I have a nice selection of magazine that only need editing, since when I go back to work it's a lot harder to spend a decent amount of time working on these during the week.

[meppi]

As I'm working on putting the multipage scans of Mean Machines 8 back together so that they are ready to start restoring them, I can't begin to explain just how happy I am that I got an extra copy of this issue.
I bought the whole set a couple of years ago, but also accepted the near complete set as part of the huge donation by Richard.

Now that I'm working on issue 8 of Mean Machines I notice that there must have been a problem when this issue got printed as quite a few pages have brown vertical stripes running all over them. Probably from grease that somehow got onto the transport belt in the printing facility.

The good part is that between the different copies I have, the damage to pages is varied. So if one issue has this problem on page 16 for instance, the duplicate issue will have page 12 messed up like this, but not page 16.
Which means that this saved me a huge amount of time that would otherwise have been spent painstakingly cleaning this up on the pixel level. It does mean I have to rescan a bunch of pages, but still, it doesn't even come close to the time I'd have to waste otherwise.

[meppi]

For people wondering when the next magazine will be out, I have opted to work on scanning and joining pages back together as much as possible during my vacation, instead of doing lots of editing and restoration.
It's easier to do this when I know I have a couple of weeks to go instead of having an hour here or there during the week.

Been making some great progress as well. The new scanner is a lot slower than the previous one, but the immediate quality of the scans seem to be higher as well, so they need a little less work in the editing department as long as the magazines are in mint condition.
Been concentrating most on OSSM and Mean Machines, which had a huge issue with number 15 that was 196 pages long, so that took over 2 days to scan! But I'm gonna try and scan some CVGs as well in my final week before I start editing again.

[sblack]

Thanks for the update Meppi. Hope you enjoyed your holidays and here's to a prosperous New Year. Thank you for all your hard effort, time and dedication in keeping our retro heart alive and kicking

[Nightronus]

Thank you very much, meppi. Thanks to you I can enjoy reading Dreamcast magazines. But I found out that links are broken. When I download them, I get "Download permission denied by uploader. (0b67c2f5)" .

[KiwiArcader]

Rapidshare changed the default folder permissions from public to private. All account owners now have to go and explicitly assign public permissions on every folder if we want people to be able to download the files. Just done that for my website. What a pain.

God bless them. Not!!!!

[meppi]

Thanks for pointing this out as I have no means of knowing such a thing as I naturally never re-download these releases myself. Luckily it's just a setting that needs to be changed and not something more drastic this time. Should be working in a couple of minutes.

I've been having a bit of trouble adjusting to the work routine again after 3 weeks of vacation, so finishing up the next issue is going a bit slow right now as I need to catch up on some much needed sleep. With a little luck I should be able to finish up the next N64 issue in the coming weekend, so it should turn up next week.

/crosses fingers.

*edit.

While changing the setting on the rapidshare site, I noticed that the tablet version of Mean Machines 8 has just broken all previous download records with 1147 downloads as of this day.
Hope everyone is enjoying all these great magazines and tries out some magazines that you might not have read back in the day as well as the quality of these very well-known and lesser-known magazines might surprise quite a people.

[Nightronus]

God bless such people. Anyway, is there any chance that we'd get a little more Dreamcast magazines scans? Thank you VERY much for your work, meppi.

[meppi]

You're very welcome.

You can rest assured that we are planning to have the complete set of  Paragon/Imagine Dreamcast Magazine online in the end.
It'll take a long time for it to be competed, but we should get there one day.
Issue 4 of is about 1/3rd complete right now and I've already started scanning and rejoining the first 30 or so pages of issue 5.
Gonna have to finish up the last 12 pages of N64 Magazine before I go back to something else, but that shouldn't take too long.

[meppi]

I might have to take things a little slower for the next couple of months.
As some of you may know, I've been planning to move for quite a while now. Finally the conditions seem to be coming together and I've started looking for a suitable place.
Somewhere nice and quiet in a much better neighbourhood than where I am now and with a lot more room to store all my stuff and finally get my game collection sorted out in a way that makes it easily accessible, no matter what system I'm in the mood to play.

Don't know when exactly this is going to happen as you never know when a good house comes on the market, but I'm hoping for it to be by this summer at the latest.
For the last couple of days I have been packing and it surprised me just how much stuff I actually had.
So it certainly is going to be taking a bite out of my free time.

Luckily, I already have quite a few magazines scanned in, so I should be able to continue restoring them without needing access to the magazine collection, which is also getting packed up again.

This doesn't mean that you won't be seeing any new releases for the next couple of months though. Just that I can't promise we'll be able to release one every 2 weeks.
I'll do my best though.
So there's no need to worry, but I just thought it was fair to give everyone a heads-up in advance.

[meppi]

Don't think I'll be able to get an update together this week.
I've been sick with the flu for the past week. Still am actually so I spend a lot of time sleeping and being miserable in front of the tv instead of sitting behind my laptop.

Next week will probably be quite nice though.