Edge never fails to disappoint

Before we get to this weeks scan we will take a short detour to pick over EDGE magazine from Future Publishing.

We haven't bought Edge since the summer partly due to funding issues and partly because its the magazine equivalent of Belgium (Sorry Belgium).  My only reason for buying it is that they have a wall chart / calendar looking at Nintendo games, (this year, 25 years of Super Mario* as opposed to 25 years of Amiga or 20 years of Super NES. ) The wall chart isn't bad and best of all there's lots of space to add dates and notes. Bad news you have to put up with EDGE magazine.

EDGE is quite simply one of the most boring and dull magazines in all of gaming, it has neither the guts to credit its writers nor engage its readership.   It hardly covers anything of mobile gaming systems or cover much retro or Japanese stuff, unlike old EDGE or GamesTM.  Old copies are very interesting indeed, they were not only designed well, but had a truly international outlook with extended out there columns and even retrogaming and Emulation ( up on Stuart Campbell's excellent world of WOS).

The current issue is case in point, for my £4.50 I enjoyed reading about Katamari Damashi and maybe a few bits in the news.  Apart from that, I largely autopiloted through the whole issue,  Git Hero got a 10 whoop de do.  Oh some Kinell (Kinect) stuff did well including Dave Brabens Tiger troubling sim Kinectimals and that but by that time I'd suffered through War, Warcraft and other boring stuff culminating in a spectacularly dull letters page and guest columnists, certainly no Redeye or Mr Biffo here.

Seeing as you've suffered enough, here is todays scan.  It Involves Dargon Ball and boasting from Adam Lee Miller (possibly not)

Mortal Kombat conquered by the dude from ADULT.

Incidentally the current record for a tool assisted speed run is just under 9min. 

More hits from the scanulator.

OK this took a while to look for but now we are here we'll present to you the US advert for the CD32 as presented in EGM issue 58.  (We've taken more scans but it seems our monitor has died and what there is is ropey to say the least.)

Is that supposed to be now here or nowhere, we'll go for the latter.

Commodore of course couldn't advertise its wares to save its life, (ironically this is from circa 1994 where Commodore called in the receivers and the sun went down on the good ship Amiga) and this Ad while not that unusual for the time is basically a load of buzzwords and cringing 'street' slang.  At least they didn't resort to selling Vapourware like the Atari Jaguar ads of the same era.  Incidentally this only hung around for one issue only of EGM proving that Commodore really were in trouble then.  

The CD32 was never a success in USA thanks to patent disputes and Commodores bankruptcy, and it really didn't have much impact in Europe, coming just before the PS1 boom.  Most of its games were either souped up Amiga titles with. extended intros and cut scenes or just the regular bad interactive movie games that stank up the early nineties. 

So there you go. The CD32.

Scanulator Redux With TV laughs too.

Everyone likes free stuff so here to prove that my scanner works is Sengoku Basara 3 which is a short magazine given as part of the freebies as part of V Jump Magazine.  Possibly last year sometime.  It's a promotional tie in with V Jump for Capcoms lacklustre in the west brawl em up.

Facts. 

File size 2.9MB
Language: Japanese.
Pages: 8
Zipped with: 7zip with no password set just download away.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/wycnf1sytg2ktf1/Sengoku%20Basara.7z


In unrelated news we have got a new universal remote to work my portable games TV (yeah we party like its 1991 baby).    The  instructions seem to have been written in and translated from stupid to English such is its incoherence.   Anyway these are the instructions for getting the automatic search function up and running as its rendered clunky in English.  Its a Vivanco portable remote.

Step 1. Turn on your TV / VCR / Skybox or whatever.  In my case TV.

Step 2. Hold down the set and TV buttons on remote, till the power button begins to flash.  It'll scan through at this point.

Step. 3 When the TV screen (or device in question) switches off,  immediately and we mean immediately press any button apart from Set to halt the scanning process.   Pushing the power button on the remote will hopefully bring your TV screen (or device) back on.  If not repeat until it does.

As an addendum there is a massive list of hardware companies on the packaging at the back covering 7 columns of closely typed text.  I'm guessing there are around 300 or so companies there with the added line that many more are covered!!. 

I'm sure these are all real companies and the like, its just that they are blessed with either silly or indeed rude names. Errors and crude misspellings accepted.

Alkos: 
Allorgan: Yeah my 50"er is Allorgan baby.
Anttron:  We'd like to think they were a portable / pocket TV specialist
Asat: Asshat. possibly a Satellite receiver box.
Black Panther:
Blackway:  Italo Disco artist too!
CNT: One letter away from immortality
Cybertron: Transformers!
Disco Vision: Possibly a record label
Dong Woo:  Its a 32" Dong, Woo.
Einhell:   German for Hades.
Electro Tech:  See Disco Vision.
Euroman:  Could well be a gay video service.
Grothusen: Possibly a porn receiver.
Harman Kardon: Spoonerism
Hornyphon: Actually part of Phillips now we looked it up.  Though rendered as Hornyphone on the list.
Interfunk:  Also an electro artist, check out our video to Strip Tease.
Kamp.
Kitt. Michael Knight.
Nad.
Noblex.
Phillips CDi: Please have enclosed instruction manual handy.
Robotron:
Saccs:
Sandra Color:
Sinotec (Pepsi Dose): Haven't a clue here.
Starlux
Starring
Stella
Stenway:  These four I'm sure is an 80's scifi complete with leading lady.
Tivo: Sky plus to Americans.
Ultravox: Midge Ure Only.
And thats it.

Happy Rememberance day.

Yellow Horned Poppies for those too ignorant to know the significance.

Please if you have any love of experimental music please get hold of the British legion 2 minute silence charity single, see here for the youtube version. Though they see the act as symbolic gesture of paying respect to those who fell in battle, theres quite a shift in tones and background noise, in which to render this actually as a valid piece of experimental music in its own right, like a radio friendly? version of John Cages 4:33.

Even if you torrent it or get it via Youtube video converters from the link provided please consider giving some change to the poppy sellers you see in the street.  You'll be doing some good providing for those maimed, killed or left traumatised by horrors of wars current and long past, oh and you'll also get a poppy too.

Now fingers crossed for Steve Reichs Come out for Comic Relief.   

Scanulator

Feeling pretty good today as I've managed to get a dead old scanner working on my old computer. It was originally my uncles and he didn't really use it that much before punting it over to me when he got an all singing all dancing printer / scanner combo. After locating all the bits including 'cutting edge parallel cable' and driver disk complete with MicroGrafx* picture publisher in both 16 and 32 bit flavours, It was time to install.


Looking at the 16it folder on the disk I saw it was broken down into 5 disk folders which if it wasn't for them entirely housed on CD would require an awful lot of disk swapping, thankfully though we XP and so can use the 32bit folder. Helpfully the autorun works so it doesn't require you to do that even simply boot up and install off of the CDROM. Simply installing Micrografx Picture Publisher and then the Driver software will do the job. We were shocked when it actually worked first time with no problems.

We were also shocked when upon saving a scan it gave out options to transfer at modem transfer speeds in either 14.4k and 28.8k flavours. It also proclaimed itself to be the best graphics utility on the market. Which it probably was back then (although with choices to save as a Photoshop file that was then as now a moot point). It was certainly no better than Amiga stuff at the time like P Paint or XI Paint.

Also seeing as its the bad old days and that, you get the odd dialogue box that makes no sense and even less help, whatsoever.

This is what you get sometimes, when installing the main driver.

Of course you'll want to make use of something more modern rather than rely on a program who's guts have long since been absorbed by the Corel corporation. So I decided to see if it could be handled entirely through paint.net. Now its hardly my first choice of paint program but seeing as its A. free and B. already loaded up on XP we gave it a go.

First hurdle, seeing as its not my main PC anymore, its not connected to the internet. So their help file is useless. Firing up my main rig I find out I need twainable, a plug in that lets you use scanners with paint.net. Installing and switching this across with a thumb drive, means that with some poking we can now take images with paint.net.
(located in the effects menu, use grab from clipboard.)

Post script: we were hoping to create an ISO. image from the main CDROM but to be honest, who wants an ancient version of Micrografx, an even more ancient version of Acrobat reader and what little driver software there is on a Multi language CD.
Incidentally if anyone has a Plustek Optic Pro 4831p Scanner and has lost their driver disk then they are located here along with a whole lot more Plustek stuff. Oh and the actual scans.... Damn guess I just forgot.
Maybe later Jack.

* oh and Finally Micrografx still exist its just that all the graphics stuff they used to do are now part of Corel. They do other stuff as outlined in their link above.