As you have probably noticed already, we have added a link to allow donations through Paypal. Do not fear, the museum remains completely free. However if you use the site a lot and enjoy it, why not show some support? All contributions will be used strictly towards the purchase of further rare games and related items for the site. There is no minimum amount, every little bit helps. Please note the Museum is NOT currently a registered charity however. We will also, as always, accept donations of vintage computer games as well, and will usually cover the postage provided the items are something we are looking for. See the Wanted page for more details on what we are looking for, and Donations in general. Anyone making a single donation of $10 or greater will be added as a permanent Friend of the Museum.
Additionally, we have just exceeded a total of 4000 PDFs in the collection!
The current batch of scanning is now complete and over 99% of the manuals have now been scanned! A final pass through the entire site has been made now, identifying the remaining items to be scanned - mostly registration cards and a dozen or so manuals that were missed. At the same time, all remaining composite images (with more than one item in a single image) were split up, and various other cleanups were performed. A small number of images were identified as needing photographing again as well. We shall continue on to scan the last few remnants that have been identified before finally declaring victory. Going forwards, new games will continue to be fully scanned of course. The only exception is that items in the Shop for sale will not generally be scanned as these are not part of the museum proper.
We have also been tossing around the idea of making the entire collection - approximately 4000 PDFs taking up 25GB - available on DVD for a small duplication, shipping and handling fee. If you think you might be interested in purchasing such a thing, please let us know. We are not taking orders yet, just trying to gauge interest. Making it into a torrent is another possibility.
Updating of the old PDFs is complete! Now all PDFs have been OCRed with a recent version of Adobe Acrobat, and are consistently straightened and cropped. This reduces the overall file sizes and also gives a consistency to the collection. Backfilling is also nearly complete, expect an another announcement as early as next week!
And the new year brings in new games. Some of the more interesting recent additions include: the cover art for California Pacific Ultima, at long last; a couple more Crystalware adventures; some rare hint sheets for Microsoft Adventure; and a rare Colossal Cave clone for Atari by Analog Software, just to name a few. Scanning continues at a furious pace, and in just another 3 or 4 weeks all the scans from the first pass should be complete. Then we'll begin a second pass, picking up any we may have missed the first time through - but I'd say the first pass has covered at least 99% of the games in the museum anyhow.
The final update of the year includes the revised set of Questbusters scans, the Usborne-Hayes programming books, as well as the older Infocoms and many others. Only the SSI and Miscellaneous Games sections remain to have their older PDFs updated (re-OCRed and recropped) - about 300 PDFs total to go, so this will likely be complete by the end of January. We are also approaching the end of the first pass of our backfilling effort, meaning in another few months every manual, reference card, and so on will be available as a PDF. The exceptions are those which are 2-3 pages and already represented as JPGs, and some of the larger books, such as the Quest for Clues series, and Prima guidebooks. These latter ones will not be scanned, at least for the present. When complete, we will make one last sweep through the website to pick up anything we have still missed, before declaring scanning officially complete. Happy holidays to everyone, and may you find whatever rare treasures you seek!