Games Available to Scan (Atari Jaguar, Sega CD, Saturn, Dreamcast, Neo Geo, etc)

[irvgotti452]

*facepalm* im gonna go broke soon 

lol

[SonicAdvDX]

As a punishment to my ignorance I went to ebay and bought boxed copy, will scan it when arrives.  

Dang! Now that's an awesome outcome! I can't wait to get the scan, my friend!

You can buy just the box from this eBay seller (Atari Sales & Service):

http://shop.ebay.com/myatari/m.html?_nkw=atari+jaguar&_sacat=0&_odkw=&_osacat=0&_trksid=p3911.c0.m270.l1313

Amongst other things (replacement white box inserts, the hologram stickers used on the front, etc).

Since my copy was the pack-in game included with my Jaguar that didn't come with a box originally, I wasn't hard pressed to try and track one down.

Holy crap, how cool is that!! I just bought 20 of those hologram stickers from that guy. I'm gonna put them in the proper place on all the UGC Jaguar covers I print out!   Thanks for the recommendation, man!

EDIT: Dang, I shouldn't have started thinking about my Jaguar collection. You guys just made me buy a NIB Tempest 2000 with the Soundtrack included. Oh, how I hate eBay.... 

[Ektophase]

Thanks for the scan but unfortunately its too bad of quality  

I gotta have a 600 dpi scan of the original manual, with descreen on probably best to have a flatbed scanner then it needs to be saved as the highest quality jpg

I'm trying to understand what you are doing, from your one post it sounds like these are scans of printed versions? It looks like a scan of a low dpi print on standard paper.

Do you have access to the originals?

Thanks anyways though   and nice collection

[SonicAdvDX]

I gotta have a 600 dpi scan of the original manual, with descreen on probably best to have a flatbed scanner then it needs to be saved as the highest quality jpg

Yeah, the Bug! scans had low dpi when I checked back and looked closer at them. Nevertheless, I was able to make a retail cover for Bug! that far surpasses the current one on the website. I printed it out and it looks great. So, I'm satisfied! Thanks a lot!

[TSOLfan]

Thanks for the scan but unfortunately its too bad of quality  

I gotta have a 600 dpi scan of the original manual, with descreen on probably best to have a flatbed scanner then it needs to be saved as the highest quality jpg

I'm trying to understand what you are doing, from your one post it sounds like these are scans of printed versions? It looks like a scan of a low dpi print on standard paper.

Do you have access to the originals?

Thanks anyways though   and nice collection

These are the best scans I can get with the equipment I have, and these are scans of the original inserts.  The comment I made concerning degradation was that, in fact, what we are all scanning are factory prints from the original artwork by the original designers, so any and all scans I make (and anyone makes) are all going to have the natural imperfections introduced during the original printing process.  The only way to do better is to get someone at Sega/Nintendo/etc to send us the original files

The photo of the Street Fighter Collection I posted was a crop at 100% zoom.  Here was the original photo:



When I look at my scans, and I look at my originals, they look the same to me.  Yes, I could scan at an even higher DPI, though, in my opinion, I end up with a larger blurrier file, rather than a crisp true representation of the original artwork (I scan at 300dpi).  Granted, my scans may not look smooth when zoomed at 100% on a computer, but, again, when I look at the original art up close prior to scanning, I see the same imperfections.  As mentioned earlier, when I did a test print of my Street Fighter scan, it looked accurate when stacked against the original.

I printed it out and it looks great. So, I'm satisfied! Thanks a lot!

I rest my case

[Ektophase]

oh ok sorry I misunderstood that earlier post. I thought you were saying something else.

hmm I wonder what the problem is, what kind of scanner do you have?

Is it a flatbed scanner?

Do you have an option for descreen at all with your scanner software?

I could scan the nights box i have (3dcontroller version but 95% same cover) at 300 dpi and show you what it looks like, I have a flatbed cheap canon scaner from like 1999.  I'll take a closer look tomorrow and see if I can see a big difference between the 2.

It just seems like you should be getting much better quality, I wonder why they are coming out so strange?

lol @ not trusting Stenchler


Edit ------heres a shot I put my unaltered raw scan at the bottom (300dpi) the 2 problems with yours are the edges are jittery and there is a weird rough texture over the whole thing       (ignore the color difference thats not an issue)    (these are not resized)

The rough texture is really evident in the light corona behind the head. Its hard to tell if its moire or some sort of scanner problem since it kind of goes with the jitter edges??

[tiktektak]

Yeah ekto you're right. I allready checked some saturn covers made with tsolfans scans and unfortunately they didn't pass quality control. There were some strange artifacts on them asnd moire and jittery stuff all over. So I think that it could be a scanner problem.

[TSOLfan]

The rough texture is really evident in the light corona behind the head. Its hard to tell if its moire or some sort of scanner problem since it kind of goes with the jitter edges??

I have a HP C309a flatbed scanner, and I scan directly from the scanner (in that, I use a USB flash drive in the front USB port and scan using the built in scanner menus).

Just for fun, I got my Nights back out, and put the instruction manual back on the scanner, and used Photoshop CS3 and the HP scanner plugin, scanned at 600dpi with the descreen option turned on.  You can view the full scan here:

http://www.ratigators.com/downloads/saturn/Nights (USA) (Front) (600).jpg

I took a sample of your area of concern at 100% zoom and you can see that here below:



I'll be the first to agree that it does not look as smooth as the sample you provided from your scanner.  Though, your sample looks to be from a completely different source, and again, I fall back to the same argument, that what I'm seeing in my scans are what I'm seeing with my own eyes looking at the original extremely up close, which is the natural effect of the original halftone printing process:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone

More than likely, the huge differences we are seeing in your scan versus my scan is that, whatever you are scanning was perhaps originally printed using an entirely different printing process.

I've said this before earlier in this thread, and that is, I'm not out to purposefully flood this project with a bunch of bad scans.  I'm scanning what I have when requested with the equipment that I have, and at the end of the day, the results I'm seeing are indicative of what I'm seeing in the original artwork, else I wouldn't even bother taking the time to scan/upload anything and waste my time and your time.  Maybe my eyesight's just too good

I'm going to be hard pressed to find a way to make my scanner make something look better than the original.  The only "fix" I can think of would be to get crazy with some blur to attempt to mask the original halftone artifacts, though, I'm not a huge fan of that.

Feel free to down-rank this thread into oblivion and re-title it as "Games Available to Scan as an Absolute Last Resort"

@BadChad

Let me know if you still want me to bother with your scans, because from the looks of things, it will probably still get rejected

[TSOLfan]

Also, here's another thought.  Again, I keep harping on the fact that my scanner is producing exactly what I'm seeing with my own eyes looking at the original.  Could it be that perhaps Sega just simply half-assed it when it came to sending all of their art to the printers for Sega Saturn games?

For example, here's a random scan I pulled from the Raw Cover Scans link on the left for a game I scanned that BadChad mentioned got rejected.  For reference, this is not my scan:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/uploads/raw/Sega%20-%20Saturn/akrate69.retail.raw_saturn_legendoasis_front.jpg

Here's another.  Again, another random raw scan I pulled, scanned by someone else, not me:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/uploads/raw/Sega%20-%20Saturn/mazut.retail.raw_saturn_saturn_street_figter_alpha_2_front.jpg

And another:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/uploads/raw/Sega%20-%20Saturn/JSF%20James.retail.raw_saturn_super_puzzle_fighter_2_turbo_bookfront_600dpi.jpg

And another:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/uploads/raw/Sega%20-%20Saturn/Gholla20.retail.raw_saturn_bighurtlfrontnew.jpg

And one more:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/uploads/raw/Sega%20-%20Saturn/dmc1974.retail.raw_saturn_panzeerdragoon_front.jpg

All different games, all different users doing the scans, and I can only assume, all different scanners.

Which would mean, regardless of how many times I try to scan these, on any scanner, there's no way to get around the fact that the original art sucked to begin with

As they always say, garbage in, garbage out

[Ektophase]

Here is your die hard and then mine. Like i said before my scanner is over 10 years old, it a Canon CanoScan N650U
I'll agree many of those scans by other people are not that great maybe they forgot descreen or something.
Im not trying to disrespect you or nothing I just think there is something wrong with your scanner, it could be a setting, or maybe its not working correctly, or the thing may just be junk machine.
Do you have access to another scanner like a siblings or friends to test it out?


(again this is a raw scan 300 dpi to match yours with no altering in photoshop)

[TSOLfan]

Here is your die hard and then mine. Like i said before my scanner is over 10 years old, it a Canon CanoScan N650U
I'll agree many of those scans by other people are not that great maybe they forgot descreen or something.
Im not trying to disrespect you or nothing I just think there is something wrong with your scanner, it could be a setting, or maybe its not working correctly, or the thing may just be junk machine.
Do you have access to another scanner like a siblings or friends to test it out?
(again this is a raw scan 300 dpi to match yours with no altering in photoshop)

No disrespect felt, trust me

Tell me what you think about this (my original on top, your's in the middle, and my new one on the bottom):



Seems I can get mine to look exactly like yours.  No rescan, or anything.  I just added a Photoshop Gaussian Blur at 1.0, and I get exactly what you get.

As I mentioned previously, I can scan at a higher DPI, but the result is just a larger file with more artificial blur to make up for the resolution the original art doesn't have.

At the end of the day, I'd rather have a scan (and scanner) that's on the sharp side (and I know everyone is probably tired of hearing me say this, but what I see in my scans are what I see when I look closely at the original art , because it's easy to add blur, not so easy to get rid of it.

[Arseen]

I'd say the last picture actually looks bit better/sharper than the second last.

[Ektophase]

I'd say the last picture actually looks bit better/sharper than the second last.

Really?.. look at the planet and the skyline behind the fox symbol

to me its starting to wash out it does look close in a way but now we are dealing with a low quality jpg that's been compressed twice I think if I started with both original raw copy's and started sharpening and adding contrast etc mine would look a lot better.

on a side note I like starting with 600 dpi, yes it will have more noticeable dots at 100% but when you clean it up at 600 then re-size it, it seems to hide more imperfections and look all around better less moire etc.

I still think pre photoshop your scans should be coming out better.

[BadChad]

on a side note I like starting with 600 dpi, yes it will have more noticeable dots at 100% but when you clean it up at 600 then re-size it, it seems to hide more imperfections and look all around better less moire etc.

100% agreed!

[TSOLfan]

I still think pre photoshop your scans should be coming out better.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this one.  Pre-Photoshop, I expect my scans to look like the original art in its truest sense.  When I scan, I scan with no options (no descreening, no color adjustment, no contrast adjustment, etc).  That way, someone creating any art from my files isn't stuck with any post-processing I did in advanced that they have to try and undo.  So, when I scan something that has a halftone print pattern visible, as you can see in the photo I took with a digital camera (which did a halfway decent job masking it with the JPG compression and probably my own motion blur taking the photo):



100% zoom:



I expect to see that in the scan (and I did).

I've never set out to provide perfect art with every bit of dust and scratches cleaned up.  I'm scanning to provide truly raw files for someone to do their own post-processing and cleanup.  So, if someone is expecting to take any file I scan and turn right around and drop it into a cover, that's probably never going to happen, unless you want something that looks identical to what I scanned