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!
This update sees a few ultra-rare Adventure International titles including: Reign of the Red Dragon (DemonVenture #1), Death Planet the Dog Star Adventure (OtherVenture #5), a Kid-Venture, and two entries in the Interactive Fiction series.
As may be expected, our PDF processing techniques have improved over time with experience. As such, it is now clear that many of the earlier scans were handled in an inferior manner. The good news is, these can be rectified completely in software, without rescanning. Thus begins another mini-project, to tidy up some 1000 PDF files (out of a total of 3200). This includes the entire Questbusters series, as well as many Infocom, SSI and Ultima manuals. PDFs will have each page straightened, re-OCRed, and re-cropped if necessary. As a bonus this will result in file sizes reduced by as much as 50%. The job is already about 20% complete, and is expected to be finished by the end of the year.
At last the end is in sight for the backfilling of manual scans. It is expected that by early 2014 the entire collection will have been scanned into PDFs. The majority of sections are already complete. Note that some items, such as the Prima strategy guides, and most books, will not be scanned. Newly acquired items will continue to be scanned as they arrive of course.
A minor overhaul on some of the older items in the site is also taking place. Specifically, photos containing more than one item in a single JPG, such as a manual and a floppy disk, are being split out into separate image files. And with the most recent update, all cassette inlay photos have been standardized. Similarly CD games will be standardized to have a photo with the jewel case front including the inlay, and a second photo of just the inlay, which will be a PDF when it contains multiple pages. Lastly, an attempt to standardize some of the file names especially on older records will take place. These little side projects will continue over the next several months in an attempt to make the whole site more consistent and standardized.