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[fiath]

Yes, Konrad is right, please scan them seperately. The aim is to reproduce the boxes should somebody have lost / damaged one.

This could also be quite an interesting job for Marc.

JPEG's do not support transparency (well JPEG 2000 does, but who knows when that will actually start to be widely assesible) so if we did this, it would have to be done as PNG's. In fact, for these ones, I guess it would be better to do as PNG's from the start and we can decide what to do with it later. Don't set the transparency though, I will need to take a look at it because transparency is easily done badly.

Konrad: Yes, I did look at your scans, and I forgot about them when x_to mailed me about Lionheart, sorry about that. I am currently organising everything we have, so I would have spotted it eventually. Anyway, the edited version of the back side of the manual is perfect. The front cover does have a line down the left side, that I would like to remove, but it is an easy change, so don't worry about it. I guess this is what you mean by being wider at the top?

At least x_to didn't start scanning yet.

About Evil Garden: Is the logo on the inner box the publisher's? I guess it is a similar thing like Psygnosis games? If so, we plan to create a "sub pack" with stuff like this so these same items do not have to be in every single release, otherwise, yes we will provide it if something different. We don't have it either way though, so I guess the argument is academic.

Anyway, perhaps you guys should work together on this one. I will leave it up to you to decide who does what, but obviously we should check your version of the game is the same.

[Konrad]

Originally posted by fiath
The front cover does have a line down the left side, that I would like to remove, but it is an easy change, so don't worry about it. I guess this is what you mean by being wider at the top?

Not exactly. As you can see the white line grows wider to the top. That indicates a little rotation in the scan. But that can't be because the other borders are close to perfect. If it would be rotated there should be a white line on every border.

About Evil Garden: Is the logo on the inner box the publisher's? I guess it is a similar thing like Psygnosis games? If so, we plan to create a "sub pack" with stuff like this so these same items do not have to be in every single release, otherwise, yes we will provide it if something different. We don't have it either way though, so I guess the argument is academic.

Indeed, it's the publishers logo in the middle. I just checked it. At the top of the "sub pack" box it reads "DEMON WARE", at the bottom "BEWARE OF DEMONWARE". The sides are also printed with the publishers name.

Edit: Oops, one thing about being a mod is that you can edit other posts by mistake! Nothing changed though, because I had a copy (phew )

[fiath]

Not exactly. As you can see the white line grows wider to the top. That indicates a little rotation in the scan. But that can't be because the other borders are close to perfect. If it would be rotated there should be a white line on every border.

I see. Well I would say we should crop that kind of thing. We only loose 15 pixels (of ~2400), though half of which have detail. But I think it looks much worse like it is. What do you think?

Indeed, it's the publishers logo in the middle. I just checked it. At the top of the "sub pack" box it reads "DEMON WARE", at the bottom "BEWARE OF DEMONWARE". The sides are also printed with the publishers name.

Well, we don't have it, so you might as well scan it anyway

[Joe Maroni]

@konrad

so should i scan the manual again...??

believe me, the box and the manual are not brand new, but it looks like they never have been used...

in any way...if one of your piece of game is damaged let me know and i´ll load it up to the server...


@fiath

so you said that the cannon fodder 2 disks are perfect...should i now begin with scanning the manual...???

the box and disk scans are already done and uploaded...

and with the help of WK (i mean the translation of the scanning guidelines) i think it would be easy to make it more perfect than the scans of Brian the Lion manual...

[Konrad]

I'm just curious about the proportions of your manual. I didn't scan the whole manual until now because I wanted to wait for a reply of the caps team. The only things I already scanned are front and back of the manual. I'm going to scan the box this weekend. You should also scan your stuff, so the CAPS team has something to compare.

@IFW

Yes, so far the only completely duplicated version! (ie no copied disks)

So my original disks really have been (over?)written on an amiga or what ? Damn...

[IFW]

We can normally tell which part of a disk is not duplicated professionally, ie written on a miggy. This could be a track modified by highscore, save game, setup, virus etc, or disk being copied.
Obviously if all the tracks of a disk are written on a miggy it is a copy. There are few exceptions to this rule, but generally 99.9% of the commercial sw was duplicated professionally.

[Joe Maroni]

@konrad

ok, no problem for me...


@IFW

did i notized that i get the game directly from a developer of the game...

i think that fiath already know that...

[IFW]

No, I did not know that, and the info file says it being from a second hand shop so it was a pleasant surprise to find it being duplicated, even more it is not modified -that would have been really annoying

[Joe Maroni]

in any way... i was happy to hear that those dumps finished a long search of the original lionheart disks...

fiath told me that you all never thought to find ever such disks...

but you see...nothing is impossible...

[IFW]

Yes since all the copies came from ebay and unfortunately it was too easy for the sellers to "fix" the disks for whatever reason - many people replace originals with cracks etc, especially if the original is broken.
Some people who live from ebay and amiga buy original disks even if they knew them not working just for selling.
I am usually very picky when I see a game not being duplicated, but all Lionheart dumps were copies so far, yet it still looked very strange to me with such a professional box what kept them from using a duplicatin service.
As we all know the answer by now, they in fact duplicated the game

[Joe Maroni]

Hi guys...

today i started to dump the lionheart game pieces (box, disks, manual)

the box and the disks are ready and i think they would be tomorrow on the server...

now the manual..

it is completely black and white (except the first and last page are still colored) and 4 pages (for every language) have a grey color...

i scanned the first 4 pages and thought...:

why using 16 colors instead of only 4 colors (2 bit)
let me try this:

i scan the page...rotate it, crop it and reduce the color from true color to 16 colors...

of course we need black and white...

the other colors are needed for the anti aliasing effect...
i liked to calculate all "anti-aliasing" colors to one grey color, so that i only need max. 4 colors for the whole manual (of course i mean not the first and last page)

now the problem:

the anti-aliasing effect could be not so good for each letter in the manual...but it is not everything deleted...

the colors that are needed for the anti-aliasing effect would be replaced by the calculated grey color...

would this be enough anti aliasing for you...??

i only ask, because this would reduce the size of the images and if anyone ever remastering this game, he wouldn´t see it, when he doing it...

let me know if this is a good idea or not...

if you didn´t understoud anything of this, i will explain it detailed...

[Twistin'Ghost]

Personally, I think you should just go ahead and use the full 256-colours of the grayscale palette. I have played around with all of that colour reduction stuff and there's too much possibility of stiff, rigid reproduction under reduced colour depths. You can probably get agreeable results using the 16-colour grayscale mode, but the amount of bytes you save by using less colours in grayscale is so minimal, it isn't worth the trouble. If we were talking about a reasonable filesize savings, I'd agree with you on seeking a way to cut all of this down, but most of the unused colour registers should be null. Retaining smooth aliasing is far more important than meager byte savings. This is preservation, after all.

[Joe Maroni]

since yesterday the lionheart box and disk scans are up...

feel free to check them...

also the brian the lion manual will scanned again...

i send fiath a pm and waiting for an answer if the quality of the pages are better or not...

please do not download the brian the lion manual...the second try isn´t finished yet...

[fiath]

Sorry for the delay in answering:

@x_to

No offense, but I think 4-colour manuals looks *really* bad. Just take them to 16 colours. These things are supposed to be viewed on monitors. People printing them out can reduce the scans to 2-colour, but not the other way round.

Just keep to the scanning guidelines, that should enable you to produce nice anti-aliased images.

If it is bigger, then it is bigger. We don't really want to sacrifice quality just because it saves some space.

@TG

Actually I disagree.

Firstly, I think 16-colours (grey scales) is fine for the scans, and actually look really good. I would agree with you if they were "normal" monitor resolutions of 72 maybe even 150 dpi - but being 300 dpi, the need for anti-aliasing is reduced, and still provides a very good image.

About space saving. Most 256 colour images reduced to 16 colours normally gives me something in the region of 70% saving. That is too much to ignore when IMO the quality is not effected all that much. Many pages I scan at 256 greyscale are around 450-500Kb, and reducing to 16 colours (also by using posterising) makes it more like 100-150 Kb.

This is working with PNG's, which is my format of choice. I guess these results depend on what file format you use.

One sticky spot most people come unstuck at is failing to optimise the pallete before saving. As you say, a 256-colour image just reduced to 16 colours may give you nothing because the application you are using has not optimised the pallete. When the pallete is optimised the RLE encoding of (for example) PNG or GIF is obviously far more effective.

@x_to

Okay, I will check today

[Twistin'Ghost]

Yes, I would agree with all of that.

More (off topic) thoughts on image formats: I never cared much for bitmaps stored in BMP, as it is not one of the better designed in its field (I think color palette information is stored better in IFF, TIFF or even GIF and PNG formats, really). I have seen so many BMP files that save as the same size regardless of what screen changes you make that I am convinced they are filling empty color registers resulting in larger file sizes. But I'm just basing that on what I've seen, not any documentation or anything.

[fiath]

Perhaps this could be that the compression used in BMP's is optional?

There are two options, (1) is RGB, which is non-compressed raw image data and AFAIR is stored simply as RGB,RGB,RGB, etc. The filesize should always be the same for the same resolution and colour depth.

Or (2) RLE encoding which should yield better compression with images of less and less detail ("blocks of colour").

I suppose it would also depend on the application used, because the colour pointers used in the RLE encoding (unless colour values are stored directly, I don't actually know) should be updated when colour is reduced...

[IFW]

Yes, bmp compression is optional... and far too much work, when you can simply prepend a header to a memory dump and make it work as bmp

[Steve]

Well I eventually got the money off the guy in the end. The bank wasn't much help though. Gits.

Anyway I've dumped (using sloooow serial cable) an alternate Legends of Valour which I've recently bought from eBay. It's in really nice condition compared to the other LoV that I dumped so I'm wondering how the disk compares quality wise. Is it any better or worse? I've installed it onto my hard drive no-problem so there are no errors on the disk. Also I'm quite sure that it's not modified but you'll be able to find out if this is the case or not. You could now have two perfect different versions of Legends of Valour. It's been uploaded to the Caps FTP server.

[IFW]

The disks are fine.