> I wish you the best of luck. I offered up my time and equipment to scan in a full set of Genesis and Game Gear manuals, though, haven't had anyone offer up anything (and I offered to cover shipping costs both ways):
Yes, it is painfully hard to attract actual donations. Even with an emulator that gets 40,000 downloads a release, I've received about 20 games, 10 boxes and 40 manuals. Now, I'm not disappointed. I'm thrilled and honored to receive anything for free! But yeah, that was with the easy to obtain US set.
Now imagine trying to get expensive EU games, and JP games from people who mostly don't speak English.
I wish someone here could buy my auction (if only to resell once finished, you definitely won't lose money with the rate these games are increasing in value) ... I wanted to scan the manuals, but it takes about 1-5 hours depending on the number of pages (some are 150+ pages like Chrono Trigger), which would eat up several years of my free time. It will kill my emulator project entirely.
I was only able to scan the most expensive and valuable manuals (3 Ninjas Kick back, Aero Fighters, Incantation, Buckeroo$, ...)
The EU and JP games are getting harder and harder to find. If I sit on my US collection, I will end up unable to obtain EU and JP carts and boxes at all. At the end of the day, priority #1 is clean game dumps for emulation. Priority #2 is cart+PCB scans. Priority #3 is box scans. Priority #4 is, sadly, manual scans. Manuals are amazing and deserve to be preserved. But I am forced to prioritize due to limited funds.
> I've only got a handful of JP boxes, Byuu, but I'd gladly let you borrow them for the cause.
For JP, I am primarily interested in buying instead of borrowing right now.
My plan is to build a complete set, and then sell it to fund the next complete set, and repeat.
I've written off the EU set as too expensive to ever complete, so I'm basically willing to piecemeal that one through borrowing.
> Just so I understand, you have the entire US collection scanned already?
All carts, all boxes, and five manuals. I did not scan the top part of US labels, although they appeared anyway in my scans, just at an angle.
My intention was never to assist fake reproductions anyway, so it's not as big a deal to me that the tops are at an angle not ideal for reprinting.
I only have five manuals scanned so far. I will probably scan 5-10 more expensive ones before the manuals leave my possession.
> I volunteer to help clean some covers.
That would be great, too.
If at all possible, I'd like to have my entire set cleaned up. Ideally, I'd like to downsample to 100-150DPI and JPEG encode at medium. Make a ~50-100MB image pack, and allow it to be combined with my emulator for one really awesome launcher that lets you see all the box art and cart labels before you play games. Plus some screen shots, meta data, etc. Would be really cool.
