SPS Scanning Guidelines (Version 2.01)

Introduction

It is probably obvious by now that SPS tries very hard to digitise the complete game before it is released. One of the factors for this being earlier rather than later is whether we have scans for all the physical items that came with the game or not. If we have scans of these items for a game, it is far more likely to be released than one without scans as we concentrate on releasing those with scans first.

However, the guidelines for scanning are very strict to ensure it is as perfect as possible. We decided that if we are going to do this, we may as well do it properly!

SPS also needs scans at a high resolution. It is probably the case that, by scanning at these requirements, you can to contribute to other projects as well.

Please Note, these guidelines are quite comprehensive, but it is all aimed at getting releases out quicker! The less time we have to spend scanning, or manipulating scans (see later), the faster we can pump out the games. These scans take time, and we would much rather concentrate our effort on other things, like remastering hardware and software, supporting other formats, producing tools to interact with the release files, and getting every Amiga game dumped... just small things like that. ;)

For all these reasons it is VERY IMPORTANT that you follow these guidelines carefully. You may want to read it in several stages because it is pretty heavy going.

Scanning is something that the Amiga community can do to help, and we do need help. Together, we show the world how digital preservation should be done.

In our eyes, there is not a more deserving machine!

Usage

As these guidelines are platform independent, they may be of use for other projects preserving the boxes and manuals of games. Therefore, if other projects would like to use them as their “scanning standard”, then please do, just as long as this document is not modified in any way, and SPS is mentioned somewhere with a link to our site.

If there is enough demand, we could always make it a global game preservation standard and less Amiga focused. Lets see how things pan out.

If there is anything that you wish to add or change, then please contact us. You may see a better way of doing something, or feel doing something in particular is important.

Guidelines

Okay, enough with all that, lets get down to the real stuff. But before you go off and scan your entire game collection, please remember two things:

  1. Tell us before you begin to scan each game. A game may be scanned and just waiting to be release, or could be in the process of being scanned and we do not want to duplicate effort.
  2. Do a couple of test scans. Say, one side of a box and a page from a manual so we can see if you are doing everything correctly, and if there is a problem, we can tell you about it. This really saves time in the long run.

Image Processors

Now, as we personally use Paint Shop Pro 7 (hereby known as PSP7 or PSP) on the PC with the scans, we describe some of the process in a this context. It may be easier if you can use that, or use the equivalent operations in whatever image processing package is available to you. Many of these operations are certainly available in older versions of Paint Shop Pro.

What Games To Scan

Before you scan anything, please drop us a note to tell us what you want to do to avoid duplicating effort. There may be many scans in progress, scans waiting to be cleaned up a bit or games ready to be released, and we would not want people to waste their time scanning something that has already been done.

Condition of Items

Pretty obviously, if the packaging for a game is in really bad condition, there is not really much point in scanning it. These items will be preserved forever more, so we might as well preserve something that looks good! If it is slightly battered, then we might be able to fix it if the damaged parts are in an area of little or no detail.

If it is just one part of the game packaging that is in bad condition but you want to do other good parts, then we would certainly welcome these, just as long as you tell us there are items missing. :)

Different Game Packaging

Some games seem to have different packaging available (different box, manual etc.), most notably between EU-US versions of games. We generally do releases for the packaging available to us or we wait if we know there is better packaging on a different edition of the game.

You might wonder if we still want scans for a game which contains slightly different packaging to a previous release... Well, the official line is “probably not”. Unless there is something dramatically different about the box / manual we would really just want to provide the best ones (so for example, scans of newly discovered packaging may replace a current “more sparse” set). However, this is best done on a case-by-case basis, so if in doubt, just Contact Us.

Incomplete Games / Missing Items

How do we know if a set of scans we are planning on releasing is complete? Games may appear complete, but it may be later found they came with a poster / stickers etc.

Basically we can’t know until a game turns up with an extra item. Obviously we need to be told the release is not complete! After that, it can be scanned and added to the game info. We will provide an update tool will indicate deprecated or replaced release items.

Budget Games

If a budget game is unique in that there was only a budget version of it (many of the Codemasters games come to mind) or the budget release has significant bonuses over the retail version, such as bug fixes, new features, music, levels etc., then we preserve it just like any other game.

The disks and maybe the box of budget versions can always be preserved as extra “add-on” packages, but usually the budget releases did not have quite as nice box / manual compared to the full price release, so we will stick with the retail release whenever possible. The budget release package may also be re-badged by the budget publisher, (e.g. Kixx released games) which is not really welcome for the purposes of this project as they tended to really “look like” budget packages.

Please do not scan budget releases without asking us if it will be used first. If you are unsure if a game if a budget release or not, just ask.

Watermarking

No watermarked images will be accepted. This includes visible watermarking on the image itself, invisible watermarking in the image, any “TAG” information that can be embedded by the image format, or any other text added to the file. This basically means you cannot put “done by X” anywhere on the image, or embedded in the file itself.

SPS do not watermark images, and we expect the same from other people. It is not our artwork, so why should we (even partially) claim it is? It certainly took a lot more effort to make the artwork than it is to scan it! For this reason alone, all images should be free from this sort of thing.

We equate watermarking of scans to cracking a game and adding an “intro”, and I guess you know our opinion on that... ;)

Any sort of messages in any part of the releases would rightly upset the copyright holders, a fair few of whom we know already enjoy releases themselves. Rest assured, this would be very different if “warezy” messages appeared. Every release should be clean, and as it was originally sold.

Of course, we cannot detect all types of watermarking, and so if you choose to do it, that is up to your own conscience. If we find them, the offending files will be removed from official distribution and peoples release sets will be marked as incomplete. Watermarked scans cannot be accepted, or will be removed if it does not effect the image. Basically: If you want to watermark your images, there are probably other projects that don’t mind, and you could contribute to.

Full credit for scans and dumps will be given on the website in due course. The points system in HOL‘s "The Team" is a great idea that we hope we can employ shortly.

You may ask if we care about people “ripping off” scans from SPS releases for their own purposes / projects... Well, as far as we are concerned, as long as no profit is made, who cares?. They are only likely to be used by the Amiga community anyway, and this is who we want to help. Besides, it not up to us anyway because they are not our intellectual property. The Amiga communities use of these scans is very welcome - because ALL THIS is FOR the Amiga community! :) In fact, it goes beyond the Amiga community because many boxes / manuals are multi-platform.

If the scans were used for profit by those that do not own the copyright, then yes, they would be ripping off the Amiga community. If we see any of this, rest assured we will point the appropriate authorities to it. Apart from the ethical issues of profiting from other peoples time and effort - this stuff should be free!

As above, these scans may be included in HOL, TOSEC, game falsities, or any other project that can use them. You don’t need to ask. We (SPS) assert that nobody should claim ownership of a digital representation of old copyrighted material apart from the copyright owners, so nobody has a right to say who can use them, or what use they can be put to - we are just making sure that they stay around in good condition for when the copyright owner decides they can go free or the copyright itself runs out.

Remember, SPS do not claim anything for themselves. The only reference to SPS in a release is the location (our domain) of the schema to verify that the “gameinfo.xml”‘s are correct, and used only for that technical reason. Years and years down the line, when we are all old and grey, who is going to care about SPS? We won’t! Just as long as we know we have preserved all the games in their original form - if we have not done that yet, I suspect we will still be working on it. ;)

Scan "Print" Resolution

The main thing you need to know is everything should be scanned at *300 DPI*. Please do not scan at any higher resolution and obviously not any less. This is the standard. Also, if we only have scans at 300 DPI, we can implicitly document how big (in physical dimensions) the scanned item(s) were.

The reason for this is we want the best quality scans, but without enabling commercial reproduction by companies of a questionable nature. Commercial grade reproduction generally requires 600 DPI scans, and these also take up a huge amount of space.

If for some reason you do have higher resolution scans (and perhaps it is a rare, otherwise unavailable game), and resize (say 50% to make 600 DPI scans theoretically 300 DPI) then only ever do it using a image processing package supporting “bicubic resampling”. You should tell us too, but otherwise you should be scanning at 300 DPI.

Not all scanner drivers and image processing applications are consistent in saving this information, so each scan must be checked. You can do this in PSP7 by selecting Menu:Image/Information, or keyboard shortcut CTRL-I.

If the print resolution is wrong (and you are sure you did selected *300 DPI* in your scanning software - this does seem to occur occasionally, hence why it needs to be checked) you can change it in PSP7 by selecting Menu:Image/Resize (or CTRL-S), selecting Print Resize, ensuring the metrics box is set to Pixels/Inch and ensuring exactly 300 is defined.

Note, the pixel dimensions of the image WILL NOT CHANGE, it is just the meta-info of the image changing. If the pixel dimensions change, then you have done it wrong. ;)

You should now compare the image to other images that should be about the same dimensions (the other pages of the manual, the other box sides, etc.) to make sure it is similar. It doesn’t have to be exact, just as close as possible. When doing this with boxes, remember the back of a box is always slightly smaller than the front, so obviously the scan will be too...

Please note, that some operations in your image processor may effect the print resolution. Therefore it is probably best to check each item when you are finished.

Image Cropping / Rotation

You can almost never get a perfectly aligned scan that does not need any rotation, no matter what tricks you pull with your scanner. We did try a few, like strapping a ruler to the scanner etc. but none worked very well.

For releases, we need images to be perfectly rotated and cropped. Yes, it does take time. But it will pay off in the end. We would rather get a few good quality scans than a large quantity of mediocre scans.

Rotation, obviously you need to do this first, try to put some kind of ruler on your screen image. PSP7 makes this easy using the cropping tool to judge if the scan is perfectly rotated against any vertical or horizontal lines on the actual image (i.e. the sides if the image if it is and box, but try to use lines on the actual image, like text, for manual pages). Text (say for the manual scans) should be aligned perfectly by the horizontal line that as the bottom of the characters. Usually we only have to rotate images from 0.1 → 3.0 degrees in order to get a scan we are happy with.

If your selected rotation angle was not quite right, then it is really very important to UNDO the operation and then modify the angle slightly to rotate again. This is because rotation will degrade the image over successive operations.

Some manuals, and other items are actually printed badly, and are not perfectly parallel with the page. We are really into exact replication, but leaving it like this just makes it look like a bad quality scan. The only reason you should not align by the text (make it perfectly horizontal) is when there is page decoration (read graphics) at the sides of the page which makes rotation for this look worse.

The other complication with rotation is that it (at least in PSP7, but probably most others too) increases the dimensions of the image. If the application didn’t do this, detail might be cropped. For this reason you should crop (or expand) the image back to its original dimensions, as described below.

Cropping, this can be quite an important part, and, like everything else, we need it to be perfect. For an example of box where precision is really needed, see the box scans in the Grand Prix Circuit release. The front cover “flows” around the sides of the box, needing pixel perfect cropping.

We don’t expect you to get pixel perfect cropping over all same-size items (for example, all the pages in the manual) - but as long as they are fairly close, it is fine. Say less than 15-20 pixels difference is not much when you consider most of these scans have dimensions of around 2000 pixels.

Do not “over crop” the scans. For example, if you cropped off part of the disk shutter on a disk scan, it would require a completely new scan to replace that small detail. Pretty frustrating for such a small thing. As a general rule, we do pixel-perfect cropping (and rotation) as much as time allows. Of course, this is less important when there is no detail to miss, like the white space at the sides of manual pages, but it is still nice to get it as good as you can.

This can be tricky for disks in particular, because they are not exactly rectangular and you should find you have white space (or black depending on your scanner / settings) at the top of the disk because of the shutter, and at the bottom between the side parts around where the label goes.

Scanning pages that have details "leaking" through

Sometimes on manuals with heavy print or thin paper, details start to show through from the other side of the page you are scanning, and thus a ghost image of it appears on the actual scan. You can try turning up the brightness in your scanner settings slightly, or use a piece of black card under the page to help stop this “see-though”, especially if it is really bad.

To get rid of any residual “leaking”, see the section: Noise Removal below.

Noise Removal

Most items scanned, particularly manual pages, have unwanted “clutter” on the image. This can be caused by dust, marks, an item in bad condition, “detail leak” as above or just dithering (see also the Dithering section below for this part) done by the scanner.

These needs to be cleaned up, or at least “normalised” in the case of dithering. The reasons are two-fold, we would like to get images as perfect as possible, but a very big reason is to gain the best image compression possible. Obviously, the less noise (and hence “detail”) there is on an image, the smaller the file is going to be.

The following only works for images with only a couple of “real” colours (not colours just used for anti-aliasing effects). For example, black and white manual pages. Anything else must be handled on a case-by-case bases, and you should Contact Us to ask.

There are essentially two ways of doing it, the best (easiest and gives best results) one is to use PSP7’s “Posterize” colour reduction function and the other is by reducing the colour depth and manually editing the palette.

The fact is, for the kind of images we are processing here (low colour ones) we really don’t need very many colours to represent it. In fact, the SPS printing guide will recommend setting images to 2 bits (black and white only) when printing manuals anyway. The rest of the colour information is only kept so it still looks good on computer monitors. We will talk more about colour depths later.

These two methods are described below, and once you have your post-processed images, you can then clear up any residual pixels lying around the image with the selection tool. You don’t need to go mad, just get rid of any clumps of pixels that are obviously not meant to be there, particularly around the edges of a scan. But anyway, if there are a lot of these by the time you have finished (apart from around the images), it indicates a very bad scan, or the item scanned was in rather bad condition.

Contrast

Still on the subject of noise removal, you may find adjusting the contrast of the image helps quite a bit with the noise removal methods below. You need to make sure you stay consistent across manual pages though, and also make sure that the image is still authentic against the original item (if available, but it is usually quite easy to see how it should look).

For very bad “dirty” scans you may need to set the contrast up to +20 (in PSP), but you shouldn’t need to do any more than that, and probably less. Don’t worry if the image still looks bad, we will address this by the following colour reduction methods.

If there is dithering on the background image, or there is some kind of texture to the paper, please read that section below first.

Cleanup by "Posterize"

This feature is located in Menu:Colour/Posterize in PSP, and is quite a bit less hassle than the method described later. If you do not have PSP, hopefully there is an equivalent function in whatever image processing package you do have.

This function basically reduces the colours of the image by letting you pick a target amount of bits per colour channel, which results in a “flatter” image.

The general guidelines are to just always use it twice! For example, we got very good results with the values 5 and again with 4. If a scan is rather blurred, you will probably get better results with 6 → 5 → 4. Never go lower than 4 and never decrease with steps more than 1.

Play around with it and see how it goes. If the image is still not very good, you can then try the other manual colour reduction method as below. If the image is still bad after that, then it is obviously terrible and needs to be re-scanned anyway.

It is important to note that, as with contrast, you need to keep consistent colour values across pages of a manual (or at least very close). We don’t want to give people a strobe effect whilst they are browsing a manual. :)

Cleanup by Palette Edit

For this method, firstly reduce the colour depth of the image to 16 colours, by selecting Menu:Colour/Reduce Colour Depth or CTRL-SHIFT-2 if using PSP7. This gives you an easy amount to work with (as we will be editing the palette directly), and is not hugely detrimental to the image as it is at such a high resolution anyway.

Take a note of the RGB value of the background colour (or use your averaged RGB value from the Dithering section below)

Cleaning up by Colour Reduction

There may be one of two things you need to do here.

If there is an obvious pattern on the paper, for example the manual has “fabricated” aging and yellowing like in Monkey Island 2 then you can leave the image as-is. It will be big, but at least it is authentic.

If the scan has just a dithered look that is obviously not supposed to be there (pixels are a few colours to simulate a different colour perceived by the human eye) we need to remove that dithering. The easy way to do this is to reduce the colour palette to 16 (Menu:Colour/Reduce Colour Depth or CTRL-SHIFT-2 in PSP7), find the RGB value average for most of those dithered pixels (in the case of real black and white manuals you can just use white. There should only be three of four (5 at the absolute maximum) now the colour depth of the image has been reduced.

You probably know this, but to average the colours you just need to take each RGB component (Red, Green, Blue) and average the values of each one. So, for example to get the red component, you may have three colours to average, with red components 220, 230 and 240, then your new averaged red component would be

new averaged red = (220 + 230 + 240) / 3 = 230

3 being the number of colours you are averaging. You then need to do the same for the green and blue components, ending up with a value for red, green and blue. It is worth noting that this does not have to be exact because even top of the range scanners do not get detect colours perfectly. You can probably do an approximation in your head, just as long as it is close.

Take this average colour and use it for the background, following the steps in Noise Removal above.

IMPORTANT NOTE: When working with pages of an item, unless subsequent pages change colour (which is obviously unlikely) you should use exactly the same colour for each one.

The one exception where you should not use the average colour is when the scan background is obviously meant to be white, but the actual scan is a dirty grey because of the condition of the item. It is easy to tell from the original if it is available. In this case, just use white. You will probably find the majority of manuals use white pages anyway

Colour Correction / Balancing

Photoshop (not Paint Shop Pro) is said to have a colour balancing feature. You can use this to keep the spread of colour in the image authentic to the original. By referring to the actual item, you just need to tell it what parts are really black and what parts are white and it does the rest for you.

Scanner "Gap"

Some scanners have a gap between the lid and the actual scan surface with produces a nasty light / dark variation or sometimes a blur across the page. As a general rule, it is best to weigh down the item being scanned with something (even if it is just your hand) to prevent the item coming away from the scanning surface.

We have found the easiest thing to use is a wad of blank paper. We use blank paper to make cropping easier later and so detail does not show through on thin items.

Naming Convention

To get releases out just that little much quicker, this really helps, so please name your scans as described in the section for each item type (Box, manual, etc.).

File Formats

For high colour /detail scans, please use JPEG at 85-90 % quality. If stuff is low-colour, or just text, then use PNG (if your image processor does not support PNG then GIF or TIFF with LZW compression will suffice) to avoid the artifacting when of the JPEG format. We repeat, please DO NOT use the JPEG file format for low colour or text based items.

Colour Depth: High Colour Images

Colour stuff should be scanned in normal 24-bit (~16 million) colours and should not be reduced to less colours for any reason as the JPEG format usually makes BIGGER files on “colour reduced” images.

Colour Depth: Low Colour / Black-White Images

Black and white items should be scanned in greyscale. It is usually quicker too.

If the scans take up a lot of space and if they are low-colour (like only 2-3 real visible colours not including anti-aliasing effects) then you can reduce the colour depth (PSP does it nicely) which will drastically reduce the space needed.

Sometimes you might find that reducing the colour depth actually changes the colours in the scanned item. At least, we have experienced it with PSP7. To rectify this you should use the “Optimized Octree” method instead of the normal “Optimized Median Cut” method available when reducing colour depth in PSP.

Please do not reduce the colour depth lower than 16 colours (for very low-colour / black-white manuals) as you will lose the anti-aliasing which is nice for viewing on monitors. It can always be reduced later for printing out, but obviously not the other way round. We should have a page up in the future that explains how to get the best results printing items contained in SPS releases, and how the above requirements fit into it.

If you do not know how to reduce colour depth or do not have the tools to do it, just let us know.

As boxes are probably always high colour, and so they should be stored as high-colour (24-bit) JPEG‘s apart from maybe a minority of cases. Also quite often the front and back pages of the manual will be high colour too. The contents of manuals (especially larger ones) usually are black and white text so will normally be scanned as greyscale, posterised and / or reduced to 16 “colours” (shades) for submission as described above in File Formats.

One tip that often reduces the file size of a “low colour” pretty easily is to optimise the palette. You can do this by increasing the colour depth to, say, 256 colours and then reduce it to 16 colours again. Just make sure that when you submit the scans, the colour depth is set to 256 colours, even if 16 or less of them are actually used.

Box

To enable nice frontends in the future, all sides of the box should be scanned. That is, front, all four sides of the front, the back, and if there is any detail there, all four sides of the back part too.

Naming Convention:

The perspective is looking down on the front of the box which is face up.

Box_front.jpg Box_front-top.jpg Box_front-bottom.jpg Box_front-left.jpg Box_front-right.jpg Box_back.jpg Box_back-top.jpg (if there is any detail) Box_back-bottom.jpg (if there is any detail) Box_back-left.jpg (if there is any detail) Box_back-right.jpg (if there is any detail)

Most boxes do not have anything on the sides of the back part of the box, some do. For examples of releases that do contain these parts, see the releases for Rolling Ronny and Unreal. If there isn’t any detail, please let us know the colour of these sides (an RGB value would be best) if it is different to the edges of the “back” scan.

Obviously, for some boxes, it does not make sense to do all of these. For example, just look at a “cassette” / “jewel” style box as in the Virus and Commando releases.

These boxes are easier to scan though. The inlay of such a box allows you to scan the whole thing in one scan. Then, you should “separated” each box face (front, back, spine) in a *pixel perfect* fashion. This means, that if somebody later wanted to print it out to replace their battered box, all they need to do, is join the images up.

Why should they be separated? Well, if you don’t know yet, you will in due course. ;)

If the box has any further artwork, for example, if it is not your regular rectangular box (Amiga Karate has a triangular box), if it has another box inside it, if it has a box sleeve etc., then just let us know and we will sort it out on a case-by-case basis.

If you would like to see more examples, obviously the current set of SPS releases provide it. A notable example is Grand Prix Circuit, it shows exactly why each side of the box is important.

Some games have inner boxes, for example, Psygnosis games often have an inner box with their logo on. Don’t worry too much about these unless they have detail that is nice or game specific. We will probably provide such scans in some sort of “parent” pack.

Manual

Manual scans will be converted to PDF for release (unless it is only one or two pages), but we will do this ourselves, so we can supply index information (or “bookmarks”) and automatically know the document is not locked / encrypted and free from any form of watermarking or false claims of ownership.

If there are blank pages in the manual, please either include them, or tell us of their existence and where they reside. You don’t have to scan them - just as long as there is no page number or any other detail on them (otherwise they are not really blank by our definition :).

To make a blank page, just takes one of the scanned pages and (after cropping, rotation, cleanup) clear it (CTRL-A then DEL in PSP) then save-as (F12) to create a image of the same dimensions. For example: Manual01.png (the page after the front is often blank).

Any other paper documentation that comes with the game will come under this manual section, this includes registration cards, manual addendum’s, or anything else.

Naming Convention

Please number pages (images) so they are sorted in the order they appear in the manual. This makes it easier to import into PDF tools and reduces mistakes when there are no page numbers to go by! (for example, Manual01.png, Manual02.png, etc.). You can keep the front and back separate (Manual_front.jpg, Manual_back.jpg) or keep them numbered as normal pages (Manual00.jpg, Manual27.jpg). But they are likely to be hi-colour JPEGs rather than low-colour PNGs.

Disks

All disks that come with a game should be scanned. Why? Because this is a preservation project! :) We are mainly interested in the labels, but the whole disk should be scanned for perspective. It is not necessary to do the back of the disks unless there is something interesting on it (let us know!).

It is important to note that the WHOLE disk should be scanned. Do not over-crop any of the disk (not even part of the disk shutter) because we will have to get you to scan it again. Disks are not exactly rectangular, so cropping is not usually completely straightforward. If you have problems, just leave a good amount of space around the disk and we will do it.

Naming Convention

Is basically whatever the labels are called, Disk.jpg (if only one disk), Disk1.jpg, DiskB.jpg, Reel1, etc.

Code Wheels

A difficult one. Some are not easy to take apart, and some it cannot be done without breaking them.

We plan to pull these apart in order to get accurate scans. This may mean that is one code wheel damaged so it can be preserved. Not a hard decision in our opinion. However, we understand you may not want to do this. If you don’t want to, then we will just have to find a copy of the game to do it ourselves, or get somebody else to do it.

There is no point in scanning the code wheels in each “position” because some have literally hundreds of possible combinations. And we have plans that will enable each wheel to be rotated independently.

Posters

Posters are nearly always too large to scan by a normal scanner, so we need to scan them as multiple parts, then combine them. For an example, an A3 poster may take 2 or even sometimes 3 scans to be able to get it all. This can be rather tricky, but can be done with a little patience and sometimes a bit of luck. :)

We would like to try to get a near pixel-perfect whole poster as one image, but stitching posters back together can be a tricky business. You also need to get the rotation of each part exactly right before you can even start with the stitching. It is best to work along the folds / creases as this is where slight stitching problems are least likely to be noticed.

The best thing would be to just do the best you can, then send it to us and we can decide if it is okay. However keep the separate parts so you can send them to us if needed.

If you have access to an A3 scanner however, you will probably save HOURS of work trying to stitch the poster together.

Stickers

It is not always obvious that scans of stickers that have come with a game are actually stickers. For this reason, please mark as such in the filename. Examples are Sticker.jpg or if multiple then Sticker1.jpg, Sticker2.jpg, etc.

Other Scan-able Stuff

There may be other things that can be scanned, for example, SWIV comes with a badge. Out Run comes with an audio tape - so scan both sides of that. Plan 9 has a video tape, so scan the side with the label. MP3 and MPEG4 (based) digital representations of these will also be needed, but this will be described as and when we plan to do a game with such items.

If you name the item appropriately, we can see immediately what it is. E.g. Badge.jpg, CassetteSideA.jpg, Video.jpg, etc.

Three-Dimensional Objects (those unsuitable for scanning)

Some things do not lend themselves as suitable objects for scanning. Examples include, lead figures, marbles, dice, or any other three dimensional object. It is probably best to Contact Us, but mainly we will try to get a photo of the object against a plain background.

Of course, if you are willing to describe the object in VRML complete with textures, we would almost certainly make use of it! ;)

Maybe 3D scanners can come into good use when they are invented / come to prices we can afford. We are serious!

Anything Else

If there is something we have forgotten, or is not covered. Please just Contact Us and we will try to find a best course of action. We will probably add it here too.

Getting the scans to us

Always a good one this! Please Contact Us and we will give you the info.

Help

If there is anything wrong with your scans, or things we think can be improved, we will let you know. The important point is not to worry too much, everybody has to start somewhere and if you are a beginner at this sort of thing then we will do our best to help you out or tell you where things can be improved.

Think of it this way, after a few games, you will probably become very adept at image processing. We want to make you scanning aficionados!

If you need any help, just Contact Us and we will try to resolve any problems you might be having.

End

Nothing like comprehensive guidelines! These are very comprehensive we know, but it is the exact rules we follow ourselves for each and every game we release. If people adhere to these guidelines, more time can be spent on actually releasing the games, and making associated tools, rather than correcting submitted scans.

We believe this is very important. Recently, many high profile articles (by the BBC, The Register, The Edge) have been written to either stress the importance of digital preservation, or about organisations that are taking an active hand in preserving our digital heritage for the future.

It is heart warming to see that there is finally a growing awareness in digital preservation. People are now realising that if something is not done NOW, many many fantastic examples of human creation will be lost forever.

Today, we have a unique opportunity to make sure that this is done right. The relatively small amount effort expended now will mean these games will be preserved, timeless, and ready to be enjoyed by anybody who is interested in the beginnings of the computer gaming ®evolution.


The SPS Team

Software Preservation Society
http://www.softpres.org