Manuals in downloads

[acronaut]

It'd be nice if including manuals in the download section was encouraged. I end up downloading many-gigabyte archives full of game manuals to make sure I'm not missing some major, undescribed feature in obscure games.

Though if this would be too much of an additional storage burden, that's understandable.

 

[Yousef Yousef]

That seems like a tall order.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I like this idea! I'm not well-versed enough on our site's inner workings to know if the server can tank all that extra data, but perhaps we can reach a compromise? Like adding manuals for games that absolutely require them to play them or as requests? Either way, yeah!

As always: if you like a suggestion, upvote it!

 

[AnonymousCookieMonster]

Some games would really need the manual. Other games, it makes do without it.

Including the manual (or having it as a download) when available couldn't hurt.

 

[ZEGA ZONIC]

Upvoted.

Some games would really need the manual. Other games, it makes do without it.

Including the manual (or having it as a download) when available couldn't hurt.

I do agree. It could be useful for RPGs where you need to understand some game mechanics.

 

[AnonymousCookieMonster]

I do agree. It could be useful for RPGs where you need to understand some game mechanics.

Don't forget a number of games due to rom size the story is stripped or 'referenced' in the manual. Early D&D games were that way too.

many-gigabyte archives full of game manuals

I'd wager the space is mostly due to it being scanned manuals so images in a PDF wrapper, but haven't been cleaned up or optimized, or in other cases, OCR'd.

I've seen books made of scanned or screencapped images that range from 300k a page to over a meg per page; And most of it is unnecessary and is unoptimized. Other than illustrations pages should take up about 3k each (and that's before compression). If i finish up my project of OCR stuff on another site. Course just cleaning the images up can result in greatly reduced size of said manuals, which i'd probably white/black threshold.

Did a cleanup example image for @fake-kun on one image as an example and you can get an idea of what i'm talking about. The cleanup removes tons of variations of almost-black and almost-white and results in far better compression.

 

[ThatsNotRich]

I was reading somewhere Spike was too busy for something of this magnitude (tedious) nowadays. We shall see in any updates.

 

[AnonymousCookieMonster]

I was reading somewhere Spike was too busy for something of this magnitude (tedious) nowadays. We shall see in any updates.

Mhmm. Probably be a 'update if i have some extra time' thing. Or better to have the community help, finding the exact match for manual to game. If it's manuals on say archive.org, then a direct link to said manual may be all that's needed.

There's a lot of manuals on game sites that batocera scrapes for game data.

 

[Amag0k1]

It'd be nice if including manuals in the download section was encouraged. I end up downloading many-gigabyte archives full of game manuals to make sure I'm not missing some major, undescribed feature in obscure games.

Though if this would be too much of an additional storage burden, that's understandable.

I think the vita ones and some of the psp ones come with manuals, but only accessible in the console.

 

[MasterEn]

Don't forget a number of games due to rom size the story is stripped or 'referenced' in the manual. Early D&D games were that way too.



I'd wager the space is mostly due to it being scanned manuals so images in a PDF wrapper, but haven't been cleaned up or optimized, or in other cases, OCR'd.

I've seen books made of scanned or screencapped images that range from 300k a page to over a meg per page; And most of it is unnecessary and is unoptimized. Other than illustrations pages should take up about 3k each (and that's before compression). If i finish up my project of OCR stuff on another site. Course just cleaning the images up can result in greatly reduced size of said manuals, which i'd probably white/black threshold.

Did a cleanup example image for @fake-kun on one image as an example and you can get an idea of what i'm talking about. The cleanup removes tons of variations of almost-black and almost-white and results in far better compression.

how did you do that? i've tried to do something like this with some of my drawings and they don't look even remotely close to this.

 

[AnonymousCookieMonster]

how did you do that? i've tried to do something like this with some of my drawings and they don't look even remotely close to this.

This is quite off topic. I'll message you. Anyone else that's interested message me too, or point to a discussion where we can go over the technical details.

 

[Comster]

I like this suggestion of having video game manuals available for downloading. I already upvoted this suggestion earlier.

 

[MasterEn]

I like this suggestion of having video game manuals available for downloading. I already upvoted this suggestion earlier.

the internet archive has several game manual collections. they range from 1 gb to about 7 gb in total size.

 

[χKai]

Then you got people who cram their devices so full of ROMs they really don't have the storage capacity for extra shit; like me. :D

I think it would take up more space than necessary, if someone wants the manual the best thing you could do is link the manual in the download page..

On all the pages, for all the games. ?

I don't know anyone who has time for that, least of all the staff here who already do a great job finding the  games; asking them for more is like you're cracking a whip at this point.