Before I mail out one of @GameHistoryOrg's blind box magazines (gamehistory.org/shop) I make sure it's been scanned online. If not, I put it in a "donate to scanning group" box. I'm finally sorting them today and it's, um, a lot. This is years of labor.
We're getting closer to my dream of having every video game magazine OCR searchable every day, I'm so excited that we're able to use this program to get more things online and make video game research easy for everyone!
I'm going to spell this all out in detail soon, but we're taking donations of your old unwanted video game magazines! Every donation either gets directly preserved (physically and/or digitally), or if that's already been done, we sell it and use the money to buy the mags needed!
As an example @KyleOrl mailed over all of his old magazines going back to the early 90s, and lots of them are now in these stacks, ready to be scanned! Several others were sold, and that money bought more mags, etc etc.
Basically we built a machine that you feed your old video game magazines, and out the other end comes magazine preservation. More scans get online, and our physical library grows and upgrades so that the originals are accessible and in great shape!
And again, if you don't have old magazines to donate but want to support the project AND get something cool in the mail, consider grabbing a blind box of your own. You can even subscribe and get a new old magazine every month! gamehistory.org/shop
They all end up on The Internet Archive, and are often mirrored on Retromags!
As of now the scanning team we send things to is Gaming Alexandria. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is one of ours. We actually used blind box money to import 500ish old Japanese magazines that they're working through.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Frank Cifaldi (Unlicensed).nes

Frank Cifaldi (Unlicensed).nes Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @frankcifaldi

28 Apr
This is an amazing reminder that what we call "pixel artists" were often painting for messy analogue television canvases. In this case, it's absolutely clear that this game is meant to be played with a composite signal. Look at what it does to the checkerboard dithering!
Poking around on Smart Blur with Photoshop has some pretty compelling results
Read 5 tweets
26 Apr
Looking at a giant pile of mystery EPROMs tonight that are all cryptically labeled and mismatched, with few clues as to anything, including their platforms. It's a really hard puzzle game basically. Image
So far it's mostly stuff like "...I think that's SNES?" but we did recently have OUR FIRST SIGN OF LIFE, FOLKS. Image
We also have what appears to be tiles for a janky, early version of Ufouria on the NES, one of my favorite games on the system! And it appears we're missing 1/2 of the game's program data, so it will never run. Image
Read 13 tweets
23 Mar
Video game companies would sometimes (not always!) "watermark" copies of games sent out before release, so that if it leaked they knew the culprit. Here's a fun example in a build I just dumped of Boogerman on the SNES. Left is retail game, right is review copy. Image
Update: Motika has been apprehended and is in federal custody
Since y'all are into this, here's my favorite prototype watermark that I've seen, just straight up in your face telling you that they know it's yours so you better not copy it, GAME PLAYERS MAGAZINE. Image
Read 4 tweets
21 Mar
Our old Cuisinart burr coffee grinder has a hilarious design flaw that fills its own insides with super fine grain coffee over time. The switch stopped working so we couldn't turn it off, there was a solid coffee brick stopping it after like 13 years of near-daily use. Image
I should brew this and relive most of my adult life in one cup
It still works but after cleaning it's dumping like 75% of the yield inside of itself, our current theory is that it's been doing this for years now but we didn't know because the fresh coffee was bouncing off the Coffee Wall and into the hopper.
Read 5 tweets
20 Mar
It's time to show everyone that Koala Mario is the king of off-model Marios. Get in here and vote Lou OUT.
You're all voting for the wrong one
There are FOURTEEN MINUTES LEFT and it is REALLY CLOSE. Get in there and give Koala Mario the win he needs. Everyone voting for Lou doesn't know what "off-model" means.
Read 5 tweets
10 Mar
I'm really proud of this episode, because we mostly talked to Howard about his craft and his creative process, not about E.T. and the market crash. In fact, it took about 45 minutes until E.T. even came up!
I think Howard's a really interesting guy, and his output during his time at Atari demonstrates a really unique take on what game machines could be capable of at the time. He's a rebel and a pioneer, not just "the guy who made E.T."
Anyway, go buy his book! There are not nearly enough video game autobiographies out there, let's demonstrate to the publishing world that we want to see more of these! onceuponatari.com
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!