Chris Chapman @retrohistories@digipres.club

Frantic week, so not much progress to report on either index or wiki, but in between feverish bursts of day job I’ve been DLing and chewing my way through the old French PC magazine “Generation 4”.

By the way, if you feel like uploading some gaming documents/bibliographic stuff/anything, whether for Underworld or any other game, registration’s open! https://morguefile.wiki/

I’m overdue to start a new page on the wiki, but I think I’ll keep pushing the Ultima Underworld page further over the coming week. I added something every day, but it still feels a bit sparse and underresearched. More work to do.

CPUs are warmed up and churning through issues of Games Magazine (RU), Dengeki Oh! (JP), Edge (ES) and Game Day (CN). This’ll be my pipeline’s first encounter with Chinese… fingers crossed.

Today’s magazine processing: new scans of Computer Gaming Strategy Plus (US) from 1997–99, upgrades/alternates of the first five issues of Videogaming Illustrated (US) from 1982–83, and 41 issues of one of the many magazines to have been called PC Player… this time the one from Spain (1995–99).

Besides filling some gaps in other years, these new Computer Games Strategy Plus scans from the VGHF have taken the number of preserved 1997 issues from two (out of twelve) to nine. Big win for preservation of late-nineties print PC coverage!

Lots of American magazines indexed/queued today: several fresh-off-the-scanner Computer Games Strategy Plus from the 90s, Videogaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated from 1983, a few upgraded scans of Play (bonus: caught some that never imported properly the first time), and two issues of Foul Videogame Subculture (2002).

Yeah, no idea whatsoever on that last one; looks absolutely terrible.

“This is dungeoneering near the apex of perfection: the only way to go from here, apart from ultra-high resolution graphics, is by wiring the images straight into the brain.”

The Age (Melbourne, Australia), 5 Nov 1992

Couple more Ultima Underworld additions to the wiki, including this THREE STAR review from the Los Angeles Times, a publication which is now dead to me (literally: they blocked access from the whole of Europe rather than comply with the GDPR).

Continuing to index the second half of the PC Engine Fan scans; should get them done today.

(OCR with Tesseract runs a lot slower on Japanese than Latin scripts… or maybe it’s because I’m running it in jpn+eng mode to pick up English search terms as well? Is that even necessary? Wish there was a guide for best practices…)

New ingests queued up today: a few issues (2011–13) of @Gamer (US), the 17-issue run (1983–85) of Micro Adventurer (UK) and starting the ball rolling on Gaming Alexandria’s new scans of PC Engine Fan (JP) from 1988–1996. Not particularly thematic, and picked arbitrarily, but any progress is good progress, right?