Book scanning continues at a furious pace, with the current focus on the hint book anthology and programming book rooms. With this weeks update all the QuestBusters hint book anthologies are now scanned, except the two that are currently missing from the museum (Book of Orbs and Manual of Swords) and scanning of the whole section is nearly complete. This may be the last update before the new year, so happy holidays to all, and may the new year bring many more rare vintage games!
With scanning of the manuals, catalogs, etc. now complete, we have moved on to some of the larger, out-of-print books. This includes the Quest for Clues series, an excellent resource for game hints and walkthroughs, as well as several others. In total there are about 50-100 large books to be scanned in the coming months, at a rate of maybe 2-3 per week. New acquisitions will continue to be scanned during this time as well. Don't forget to take advantage of the Advanced Search, which lets you search the text inside of PDFs! Happy Adventuring!
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!