racketboy.com

Wow!! This whole thing is like being back in middle school where people like to jump your sh*t without knowing the whole story.......Glad we have all out grown that

BTW: Great site Racketboy! I never saw you take credit for the scan anywhere.

Ok I am going to post my thoughs and explainations on the Retromags/Racketboy situation

Retromags.com started off as an attempt to give back something to the Emulation community, Most of us take for granted the blood, sweat and tears that people go thru to aquire, dump and properly emulate a videogame. www.gamemanuals.net is the inspiration for Retromags, They are a group of people scanning game manuals for the cause. Anyways back on topic . Retromags.com is a small site only around 100-150 Unique IP hits per day , there is very little advertising for the site , most of our hits come from Mininova.org and a few Emulation forums that mention the project

Back on June 26th a member on my site mentioned that he was thinking about posting our current project on Digg.com

http://www.retromags.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=754

He posted it soon after but soon realized that someone had posted a simular story that gained more exposure then his post

Retromags Digg
http://digg.com/gaming_news/Site_dedica ... es_on-line!

Racketboy Digg
http://www.racketboy.com/retro/2006/06/ ... -1988.html

I am not going to lie , I did see an increase in hits because of Racketboys Digg , But only because someone posted a link to my site claiming we had already scanned that Issue

A few days passed and i started to recieve feedback from my users on the forum. Now lets explain that its VERY hard to find people who will donate there time and patience to a project. Its even harder to find people who will do this and recieve no recognition for there work. Most Scanners and Editors join up anxious to do there first scan/edit. Sadly many fall into a pitfall of noticing there are more leechers then contributers. Not everyone who comes to the site is willing to contribute or even seed the releases. So many Scanners/Editors throw the towel in.

I cannot expect ANYONE to join the project and help , If the scans are showing up on other websites and I do nothing about it. So Last Night I Contacted Joystiq.com and asked them to correct the misprint. And I also created a retaliation Digg

Retromags Retaliation Digg
http://digg.com/gaming_news/First_Issue ... Ripped_Off!

Also i posted over at the Racketboy forums. I hadnt noticed he had a Forum until after i made the Digg. So why did i make the Digg over 1 magazine? Well i didnt ......While at his site i saw the first issue of PSM had been claimed also . That was what drove me to make the Digg ....In addition to the fact that many of the sites that took the Digg news and posted it on there sites had also made it seem as though Racketboy scanned the magazines

Below is a Quote from Joystiq.com

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/07/08/downl ... 88-in-pdf/
==========================================================
Chances are, if you were a wee tyke who liked video games in 1988, you wanted the first issue of Nintendo Power when it was released that July. Well if missed it, Racket Boy scanned the whole thing into a downloadable PDF for your retro reminiscing pleasure.
==========================================================

And Joystiq wasnt the only website who made it seem as though Racketboy scanned that issue. Along with the fact that if you go to Google.com and type "Nintendo Power" about the 10th link down is Racketboy looking like his site is the one who scanned it, And no where on Racketboys website at the time did it correct the misprint and state that he had aquired it from Underground Gamer (Where a few of our torrents are)

So basically thats the story. Maybe i should have contacted Racketboy first. But when you see two pieces of work from a project your working hard on , And Multiple Emulation sites are quoting that He Scanned them. Well All you can do is become a little pissed off. Anyone who Downloaded the 129+ Nintendo Power Torrent , 75% of that was done by 1 man (KMFDManic)

Now that Racketboy has properly given credit to Retromags for the release of the magazine , I have no problems whatsoever with him or his staff. Again Its very hard to find people that will donate time and patience to a project such as this. Where you put out 110% and only recieve 10% back. I dont want to see anyone else get discouraged and give up over this

The Final goal of Retromags.com is to find 20 people who can scan and edit just 1 magazine per month. That would equate out to 4-5 releases a week. And is at a pace that no one will get burned out or feel taken advantage of.

I offer my applogy to Racketboy and hope that together we can put our resources together and archive some magazines together

-Phillyman

NOW THATS MORE LIKE IT!!!!!!!

LONG LIVE CLASIC GAMING!!!!!!

P.S. BTW I AINT KIDDIN ABOUT HELPIN U OUT WITH THE UPLOAD SINCE I AINT GOT SKILLS OR TIME TO SCAN MAGAZINE THE LEAST I CAN DO IS LEND U GUYS MY INTERNET ACCOUNT SINCE U SAID U NEED MORE SEEDERS THAN LEECHERS P.M. HERE AND GIVE ME INSTRUCTIONS WHAT TO DO

Just as a follow-up:
Everything is cool between me and RetroMags.
We've discussed the whole situation, Digg and all, and we're moving on.
Let keep a good attitude going and hopefully between the two sites, we can have a rockin' archive

Yaaaay

I totally see where he's coming from wanting the effort he's investing to increase his sites traffic and not have anyone piggybacking off him, but really no one but nintendo, sega, ign, etc... have a right to that content. It's like you can't just take a picture of a famous piece of artwork and sell posters of it without somone coming knocking on your door. And if someone copied your photo they'd really have as much right to it as you did (or didn't) anyway.

That said, I know it's not like Nintendo is coming down on them anytime soon for scanning 80s mags.

What I'd do if I were him is imbed a big watermark in my PDFs like stock photo websites do (corbis, getty), so the content is all still enjoyable and readable but no one is going to easily claim his work as their own. Maybe you should do that yourself Racketboy?

Holy crap! I had no idea that it was posted to Digg and I just checked my server stats and realized that I've used 300 GB of bandwidth this month just for hosting Sega Visions and Nintendo Power issues 1. It's a good thing that I've got 1 TB of bandwidth, but I've taken the Nintendo Power down, and will now host only the Sega Visions.

It's a good thing you guys worked it out because I appreciate what you're both doing. Keep up the good work.

walrus12 wrote:I totally see where he's coming from wanting the effort he's investing to increase his sites traffic and not have anyone piggybacking off him, but really no one but nintendo, sega, ign, etc... have a right to that content. It's like you can't just take a picture of a famous piece of artwork and sell posters of it without somone coming knocking on your door. And if someone copied your photo they'd really have as much right to it as you did (or didn't) anyway.

That said, I know it's not like Nintendo is coming down on them anytime soon for scanning 80s mags.

What I'd do if I were him is imbed a big watermark in my PDFs like stock photo websites do (corbis, getty), so the content is all still enjoyable and readable but no one is going to easily claim his work as their own. Maybe you should do that yourself Racketboy?

I really dont care about the traffic to my site .....Like racketboy i only gather $0.15 to $0.75 a day from clicks ......the only reason i want recognition is to gather a team of 20 scanners/editors that can get the project moving ........Imagine if i get 20 people that can scan and edit just 1 magazine per month .......thats 4-5 new releases per week ......and a total of 120 releases per year........considering we are staying 5 years behind the current publication date .......we could knock out quite a few magazines in full

Nintendo Power is almost done completly up to the 5 year mark .......PSM will only be 40-45 issues considering it started in 1997 ...........and continue on from there .......Hopefully we can get a few international scanners and us people in the USA can get a glimpse of what Nintendo Power looks like over there .......Most people on Ebay wont ship to the USA because its not worth it in the end to do so .....especially for multiple magazines ......My website doesnt host the magazines AT ALL ........we use rapidshare , newsgroups and torrents to spread the releases .......So dont think for a minute that i am selling these mags .......we only ask for donations to keep buying magazines .......somepeople dont like Nintendo Power .....how can i ask someone to edit a magazine they wouldnt read .......so we try to get a rounded selection for people to work on ......Over the next month i am going to scan 1 new magazine per day ........if any of you guys want to help edit ......you will get credit for the edits ......I myself really dont care about credit .....only that the project moves forward

What's that japanese magazine egm was always talking about? Is it Famitsu? I remember they say it always give really harsh ratings and when a game like Sonic Adventure or Zelda on N64 got really high rankings that helped hype them up. As a kid i was mostly nintendo power and sega visions, but in highschool i started w/ egm around 92/93 and switched to Gamefan and Next Gen. Gamefan was my favorite for "hardcore" info on imports but their layouts were sooooo jampacked it almost gave you a headache.

phillyman wrote:

walrus12 wrote:I totally see where he's coming from wanting the effort he's investing to increase his sites traffic and not have anyone piggybacking off him, but really no one but nintendo, sega, ign, etc... have a right to that content. It's like you can't just take a picture of a famous piece of artwork and sell posters of it without somone coming knocking on your door. And if someone copied your photo they'd really have as much right to it as you did (or didn't) anyway.

That said, I know it's not like Nintendo is coming down on them anytime soon for scanning 80s mags.

What I'd do if I were him is imbed a big watermark in my PDFs like stock photo websites do (corbis, getty), so the content is all still enjoyable and readable but no one is going to easily claim his work as their own. Maybe you should do that yourself Racketboy?

I really dont care about the traffic to my site .....Like racketboy i only gather $0.15 to $0.75 a day from clicks ......the only reason i want recognition is to gather a team of 20 scanners/editors that can get the project moving ........Imagine if i get 20 people that can scan and edit just 1 magazine per month .......thats 4-5 new releases per week ......and a total of 120 releases per year........considering we are staying 5 years behind the current publication date .......we could knock out quite a few magazines in full

Nintendo Power is almost done completly up to the 5 year mark .......PSM will only be 40-45 issues considering it started in 1997 ...........and continue on from there .......Hopefully we can get a few international scanners and us people in the USA can get a glimpse of what Nintendo Power looks like over there .......Most people on Ebay wont ship to the USA because its not worth it in the end to do so .....especially for multiple magazines ......My website doesnt host the magazines AT ALL ........we use rapidshare , newsgroups and torrents to spread the releases .......So dont think for a minute that i am selling these mags .......we only ask for donations to keep buying magazines .......somepeople dont like Nintendo Power .....how can i ask someone to edit a magazine they wouldnt read .......so we try to get a rounded selection for people to work on ......Over the next month i am going to scan 1 new magazine per day ........if any of you guys want to help edit ......you will get credit for the edits ......I myself really dont care about credit .....only that the project moves forward

Am I the only one who could make absolutly no sense out of this post ?