Chris Chapman @retrohistories@digipres.club

Heya, I'm Chris, an amateur game historian.

I run a community wiki for game research materials (https://morguefile.wiki/), occasionally upload new things to the Archive (https://archive.org/details/@trioptimum), have an 8+TB hoard of old game magazines I'm slowly indexing (not online), and make mini-documentaries about interesting stories from game history (https://www.youtube.com/user/trioptimumuk).

Currently working on a video about the turbulent development of Vampire: Bloodlines.

New Skyrim port for stomachs just landed.

Been a few months since I’ve done an Offline Day (24 hours unplugged on the first Friday/Saturday of the month), but I have my books/magazines/housework list/cooking plans/cross stitch/calligraphy set, and I am ready…

Attention’s been on other projects (back into a regular routine of working on the Bloodlines doc, finally!), but today I’m indexing the most recent Gaming Alexandria-scanned Famitsus from 1993 (many were DMCAed this week, but the last month’s uploads are still on the Archive) alongside random issues of a UK OG Xbox magazine called XBM.

(I think I meant Revised Edition)

Long shot, but does anyone have any idea where White Wolf might have run advertising for the first edition #worldofdarkness TTRPG sourcebooks in the late 1990s/early 2000s? Extra points if they're already online...

The remaining 1991 issues of New Computer Express (UK) are indexed — I think that’s every issue! Moved on to Gaming Alexandria’s ongoing uploads of Famitsu (JP) from ’93.

Was asked by our overlords’ infosec department (relayed through my boss) for the ‘security key and password’ for our site.

I said, truthfully, that I had no idea what they were talking about. Which got relayed up the line as ‘our developer says we don’t have one’.

It emerged that they actually wanted our SSL certificate and private key. No explanation was offered.

And yet somehow I’m the one who looks like the idiot in this situation.

My incoming jdownloader folder is 1.41TB, that’s just the stuff I haven’t even put anywhere yet. The queue for the queue.

I’d say I may have a hoarding problem, but is there really such a thing as a hoarding problem when it’s all digital? Unconvinced.

But it’s a task without end, for certain. The acquisition rate’s so high that I don’t think I’m even getting closer over time, expressed as a percentage of completion. But the important thing is that the index is growing.

Huge extraction/OCR backlog building up behind the pipeline now… the magazine uploaders never take a day off! Will try to get through as many 1990 New Computer Express (51 issues in .pdf and .cbr; I index them both, since more sources of OCR = more opportunities for a search match) as I can.

Bit of a scare this morning when my Mac booted straight to recovery mode. It’s back now but definitely on borrowed time.

New machine I’ve ordered isn’t going to arrive until the back half of August. Just hang on there lil buddy…

Troika game logos (2001–2004).

Cleaned up from the best scans I could find of each. Feel free to use.

Ingesting 1989’s issues of New Computer Express (UK), a tabloid-style weekly industry newspaper full of absolute gold, uploaded in high resolution by zzapmort: https://archive.org/details/new-computer-express-001

The upload is kind of a mess tbh (weird formats, misnamed files, nested zips). Took a bunch of labour to get it sorted, but I got there finally.

Been a while, but I’m back to the mags. New scans of OXM (US) and Ozidual’s recent scans of The 64Dream (JP) going in.

All right. Finally reset my password and logged back into Mastonaut on the reinstalled desktop. 👋

My 2013 iMac’s survived power cuts, spills and being in a damp, mildewed building with no roof for nine days after a fire, but last night its SSD seems to have given up the ghost. Something badly wrong; won’t boot, can’t even dismount to erase it in recovery mode.

Hoping I can get it booting from an external drive to wring a few more months out of it. At a bit of a loss without it, tbh.