Game manual preservation? \ VOGONS

Game manual preservation?

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First post, by Kirben

Posted on 2022-03-16, 10:36

Kirben Offline

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Are there any projects around for complete preservation of game manuals for older DOS games? I mean actually converting game manuals to digital formats, with color artwork, proper pages (no folds in middle), indexing and text search. Rather than just scanning the game manuals into a digital format.

The Museum of Computer Adventure Game History offers the best I can find, but their source materials are often flawed (writing inside).

Reply 1 of 6, by RandomStranger

Posted on 2022-03-16, 11:13

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Not that I know of. GoG manuals are usually good, but even they are not consistent. Like for example their Daggerfall manual is just a simple scan.

Reply 2 of 6, by Stiletto

Posted on 2022-03-16, 16:37

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Moved to Milliways.

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 3 of 6, by gerwin

Posted on 2022-03-16, 17:04

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Here are about 4000 PC (DOS/Windows) manuals. Mostly scans and native digital format:
http://www.replacementdocs.com/download.php?list.2

Archive.org also has game manuals, usually they come with crude machine-OCR-ed digital versions.
It can be a long way from a crude OCR to a polished and nicely readable digital document...

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 4 of 6, by Cuttoon

Posted on 2022-03-16, 17:11

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I can tell you that much, they do exist. Really perfect editions in PDF.

I have this for the original Master of Orion:

Filename: moo.pdf
File size: 962.24 KiB
Downloads: 98 downloads
File license: Fair use/fair dealing exception

(@moderator, I'm sharing this in good conscience as I own the printed original. Please remove if necessary, sorry.)

I like jumpers.

Reply 5 of 6, by Cuttoon

Posted on 2022-03-16, 17:37

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also, this:
http://replacementdocs.com

(may be old news, I did not check the average quality of their 3.7 gazillion PDFs.)

I like jumpers.

Reply 6 of 6, by doshea

Posted on 2022-03-23, 07:32

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I found some good scans of manuals for Microprose games on scribd.com by user "remow", and it looks like they've scanned manuals from some other publishers too. They don't have a PDF table of contents or internal links, but the text is searchable and generally all the materials including maps have been scanned in colour.

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