[HN Gopher] Old Games Magazines
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       Old Games Magazines
        
       Author : ritchie_13
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2025-01-28 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
        
       | jay_kyburz wrote:
       | I thought it was going to be more like this gaming mag.
       | 
       | https://archive.org/details/DragonMagazine260_201801/Dragon%...
       | 
       | ps. My era of gaming starts around issue 100ish.
        
       | coreyp_1 wrote:
       | I feel the same towards the "Computer Chronicles", which, IMO, is
       | the best example of unbiased tech reporting that I have ever
       | seen. I still love to watch the old episodes. Unfortunately, even
       | though I have most of the 20 year history of episodes, many are
       | still missing.
       | 
       | Internet Archive, Individual episodes. Unorganized except for
       | seasons. Many different video versions. 965 Gigs:
       | https://archive.org/details/Computer_Chronicles
       | 
       | Internet Archive, single zip file. Re-transcoded, better
       | organized and documented as to Repeat, Missing, and foreign
       | language versions. 83.5 gigs:
       | https://archive.org/details/computer-chronicles-full-epidose...
       | 
       | If downloading from the Internet Archive, there is a CLI tool
       | called "ia".
        
         | boomboomsubban wrote:
         | >If downloading from the Internet Archive, there is a CLI tool
         | called "ia".
         | 
         | As that's not the easiest search target,
         | https://archive.org/developers/internetarchive/cli.html
        
           | coreyp_1 wrote:
           | Thanks! I was in between meetings so didn't have time to
           | elaborate.
           | 
           | I love the `ia` tool, but it drives me crazy that it can't
           | resume a failed download. Some files are fast (~30 meg/sec).
           | Others are painfully slow (~100 kb/sec). The same collection
           | can contain fast and slow downloads.
           | 
           | I had a file that kept failing when using ia, after about 6
           | hours of downloading at the slow speed. I switched to Chrome,
           | which still downloaded at the slow speed, but Chrome would
           | attempt to automatically resume the download, and if that
           | failed, you can press a button to ask Chrome to try to resume
           | it again. I have had to fall back to that clunky solution
           | several times.
           | 
           | My only other concern is that ia does not download files in
           | parallel.
           | 
           | Aside from my minor complaints, I'm thankful that it exists,
           | and I have told other about it since discovering it myself in
           | the last few months.
        
         | dfxm12 wrote:
         | There are a lot of episodes on YT as well, if you haven't
         | already looked there.
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/@ComputerChroniclesYT
        
           | coreyp_1 wrote:
           | I know about it, but I haven't looked yet. In the large
           | episode group, there are 658 episodes. The YouTube listing
           | doesn't make it easy to search for a particular episode,
           | though, and YouTube's compression is horrible.
           | 
           | I face the same dilemma on Bob Ross' The Joy Of Painting. I
           | would love to download them, and they are on YouTube, but the
           | compression makes them look really bad. Well, that, and I'm
           | not sure how to download a huge number of vids from YouTube
           | like that. :/
        
       | tac19 wrote:
       | What will be the vital source of cultural history when people
       | someday look back to where we are now?
        
         | SllX wrote:
         | TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Instagram, Reddit,
         | Wikipedia (including the Talk pages), KnowYourMeme and Urban
         | Dictionary. Probably Discord too.
        
           | tac19 wrote:
           | Those persist only at the whim of a corporation. There is
           | nothing that preserves them, as they were at a given time, or
           | keeps them in existence if their owner goes out of business
           | or is cast out because of political feuds.
           | 
           | Not that there is a perfect record of every cultural artifact
           | before the digital age of course, maybe it'll all work out
           | somehow.
        
             | SllX wrote:
             | Correct, but if you're trying to capture _today_ , these
             | are the lion's share of what you want to capture.
        
         | doesnt_know wrote:
         | There won't be any except whatever is output from some llm and
         | it will be unverifiable.
         | 
         | The specific context of video game history comes up now and
         | then in "indie game journalist" scenes like aftermath. Games
         | journalism in particular has gone through a consolidation and
         | with it comes the destruction of archives both physical and
         | digital.
        
           | bluescrn wrote:
           | With modern games no longer playable once the servers go
           | offline, the only recorded history of the modern era of
           | gaming will soon be on the hard drives of YouTube and Twitch
           | servers. For as long as that survives.
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | For gaming, we have hours and hours and decades of let's plays
         | for games - but those could disappear in an instant if Youtube
         | decided they weren't profitable.
         | 
         | Archive things. It's easier than ever to keep local copies of
         | media, and it could be quite valuable someday.
        
       | classichasclass wrote:
       | Computer magazines, too. I still have my personal library of
       | COMPUTE!, COMPUTE!'s Gazette, Family Computing and Creative
       | Computing, and various scattered issues of BYTE, Ahoy!, RUN and
       | Micro 6502. They're a window into a different era, there's
       | something about leafing through the well-worn pages that a PDF
       | copy doesn't recreate, and they don't link rot. (They just rot if
       | stored improperly.)
        
       | LorenDB wrote:
       | Tangentially related: I wish there was still a good selection of
       | tech magazines in print. Everything has moved to digital only
       | nowadays.
        
         | GuinansEyebrows wrote:
         | Imagine a print edition of LWN
        
       | JKCalhoun wrote:
       | >... while the Internet Archive does contain patchy collections
       | of scanned magazines, it is vulnerable to legal challenges from
       | copyright holders.
       | 
       | Yeah, been downloading those and other magazines while I can.
        
       | driscoll42 wrote:
       | RetroMags - hhttps://www.retromags.com/ has 5218 various gaming
       | magazine issues and strategy guides one can download to check
       | out! Looks like the VGHF and RetroMags are working together from
       | forum posts, with the VGHF doing a lot of work on making them
       | more accessible than a raw cbz/pdf download.
        
       | throwaway37485 wrote:
       | Used to get C+VG in my teens. It would have reviews of new games
       | as well as tips, maps, interviews with developers and game code
       | to type in.
        
       | esafak wrote:
       | The most memorable one for me was Zero
       | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_(video_game_magazine))
       | because it did not feel like other games magazines. The writers
       | displayed a more adult sense of humor, in my recollection. Have a
       | look: https://archive.org/details/zero-magazine
        
       | qw wrote:
       | I subscribed to "CU Amiga" and "Amiga Format". I kept them for a
       | long time, but had to throw them away when I moved a few years
       | ago.
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-28 23:00 UTC)