Old Games Magazines | Hacker News Reader

Old Games Magazines

theguardian.com

103 pointsritchie_1338 comments

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".

>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

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.

There are a lot of episodes on YT as well, if you haven't already looked there.

https://www.youtube.com/@ComputerChroniclesYT

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. :/

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.

French readers are blessed with Abandonware Magazines and more than 20k scanned magazines: https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/

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

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.)

I always had a soft spot for Creative Computing. I enjoyed their silly line drawings and the irreverent prose. In its later years it got kinda stodgy, though.

Tangentially related: I wish there was still a good selection of tech magazines in print. Everything has moved to digital only nowadays.

Imagine a print edition of LWN

I still have my December 1999 issue of PC Gamer. Always bet on Duke:

https://www.giantbomb.com/a/uploads/original/8/84192/1502605...

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.

Unfortunately, "Gaming" and "Gamers" only refer to video games and their players in modern usage.

What will be the vital source of cultural history when people someday look back to where we are now?

TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Instagram, Reddit, Wikipedia (including the Talk pages), KnowYourMeme and Urban Dictionary. Probably Discord too.

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.

Correct, but if you’re trying to capture today, these are the lion’s share of what you want to capture.

Indeed, a lot of potentially interesting physical media has no doubt been destroyed, and more still is surely sitting somewhere inaccessible to those who would like to access it. But there is arguably a higher risk in a world where everything sits on servers controlled by for-profit corporations. Which is why organisations like the Internet Archive are so important. If you are concerned about this stuff I would suggest donating to IA, or at least making offline backups of the data you consider to be important (both personally and culturally).

> for-profit corporations

Non-profits go dark when they run out of money, too.

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.

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.

Related to games becoming unplayable, we're trying to stop that: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

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.

Videos made by random people aren't the same thing. Better in some respects - let's play videos show games comprehensively - but I don't think they properly replace the professionally made magazines which cover many topics and of opinions, have easily skippable ads and are more suitable to self-paced exploration.

I'm also concerned about not being able to run the software at all due to the complexity emulating modern systems (even for non-gaming applications) which rely on servers for functionality and licensing (DRM).

Are those Let's plays valuable because of games or because of personality of gamers?

If it comes to games, they have nearly 0 value and they can disappear - that would not change the value of the game, as they are derivative works and not the ones that are leaving influence. They have hardly any representation of culture around the game, and those who does not talk can be easily replaced with AI playthrough, so I would not care that much. Also, we are forgetting that gamers enjoy to discover new things - and those let's plays are there for a different reason - to stake a place of being there as the main source to generate income from ads and they are aimed at long investments, so they won't disappear as soon as I would like.

I used to devour GamePro magazines (and was against Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) for some reason.)

I also randomly received a free subscription to the print magazine "Internet Underground" which really opened up my world to some new websites.

Link to two issues of Internet Underground: https://archive.org/details/Internet.Underground.v02n06.June... https://archive.org/details/InternetUnderground01Dec1995/pag...

Archive of all Bulgarian video game magazines:

https://projectlazarus.bg/magazine-rack/

Polish ones:

https://stare.e-gry.net/czasopisma

Благодаря!

In English: Thank you!

Nearly two decades ago, I spent my time as a young teen on a Korean MMO called Flyff. It was pretty cool to read a forum post from one of the EDGE writers gathering people's opinions on the cosmetics they liked using for their characters. I posted my reply and then a few months later got to see my post on print! A neat little core memory.

When I was a kid, every month I was waiting to get the demo CDs of the Turkish gaming magazine "Level". It was such fun times. I remember in one of those magazines, they had a small tutorials for C++ to make games and it was the first time that I tried programming with games magazine actually.

Very cool what the VGHF is doing. In addition to magazines, old video game forums (old being early 2000s in this context) seem interesting to read from the few snippets I've come across.

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.

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.

MacAddict and GamePro were my world!

I was able to download them and a bunch from RetroMags

>... 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.

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