Redb3ard

For those who think I've dropped dead on this topic. I've fallen into some rabbit hole of identifying the fonts for this, but not without progress. The main body text on the cover is MacWrite 1.0 (for the Mac Plus), Geneva 12 point bold. It's a bitmap font, and it does not exist in that form anymore (Modern Geneva is a vector font). Each point size has a different shape, and the styles (bold, italic, others) is created algorithmically. This means that the few reproductions others have made won't work... they reproduced the regular/plain version of Geneva, which does not have the correct shape. I've been working on a system to screen capture each of the 220 characters, I've got a script that can take bdf fonts and turn them into Truetype. The only missing piece is something that takes the bitmap and turns into bdf (which is a bitmap-ish format). With 7 typefaces, 5 styles, and 5 sizes, that's 1120 font files if I do them all (which, once I get it automated, will be easy enough). I have yet to identify the headline fonts in that cover, but I'm assuming it's still MacWrite, possibly with third-party fonts. Might be a few more weeks, but I'll finish this one and get back to the DataBiotics manuals that are relatively easy.

Preliminary graphic for TI Runner... not perfectly happy with it, but if it was square pixels then this is the best I can manage. All of the bricks line up relatively, but the middle ladder has to be wider than the rest. The source svg is 96k (plenty small for our purposes), but the monochrome.png is only 1k. Pretty tiny. If anyone has *any* clue on the font on the front cover (honestly wonder if it might not be TI software that did it), please respond. It may be impossible to match otherwise.

Vector will scale more cleanly, but I wonder how authentic it is. I think I've figured out a way to do both at the same time, so will run tests and see which one looks right, works, etc.

Does anyone have any strong opinions on whether the front cover image for TI Runner's manual should use a vector image (I've used those so far, but the lineart/clipart for those justified it, and the filesize reduction made it really awesome) or a monochrome bitmap image? It will be roughly the same amount of work to clean it up to my standards either way. As a bitmap, I worry that it won't look correct even though PDF supports raster embedded images. The size of the image requires each "pixel" to use several literal pixels, but as those can only be in 2x2 or 3x3 blocks (etc), the size this needs to be has those being fractional. Even if I manage to get it sized correctly, I worry that some pdf viewing software will blur or do interpolation when you're zoomed in, you won't see the crisp pixel lines. Vector will almost certainly be larger (in monochrome raster, you get 8 pixels per byte, even more with run length encoding). It may print better (unsure of that), but if anyone ever wants to extract it from the pdf to use in some other material, I've sort of made that more difficult. In any event, about 50% done with it, but having a hell of a time matching fonts. If anyone can speculate on what EB Software was using for their manual design, I'd love to hear it.

I have finished the primary typesetting for Star Runner: star-runner-printable-black.pdf star-runner-printable-blue.pdf These are the printables, on white/empty backgrounds. The blue one may consume quite a bit of expensive ink, please proof it before deciding you need a paper copy. It's as close to the blue ink in JB's scna (Thanks JB!) as I could get. These may not be the final version, if anyone points out any flaw or typo I'll present newer versions correcting those. I'll also provide a digital copy, but you guys should decide what bacjground color to use. Some pastel like the other Databiotics manuals maybe. I might even do both a black-ink and a blue-ink digital version for this one. Please let me know what you think, I'm not averse to criticism. Some curiosities I've noticed myself: the black is significantly smaller than the blue, despite being essentially identical. The only real difference is that instead of #000000 for the SVG's color, I've switched it out for #4f5095. I suppose that unlike Chronoscope's html source file where it only has to have that color once, Adobe pdf format is explicitly setting that color (that isn't black/#000000) for every little path stroke/fill in the image. That may not be correctable (thankfully, this stuff's pretty much all black line art). On Preview.app in MacOS, the pdf file is still showing weird stuff when I select/highlight text. Worse, when copy-pasted, the text is always reversed. If someone could open these and copy-paste into notepad.exe or whatever and check that out, I'd love to know if I've borked the pdf files somehow, or just my own computer's copy'n'paste. If no one nominates another, I'll probably work next on EB Software's TI Runner as that scan appeared in another thread even though it's not technically Databiotics'. I'll probably do that with the rest, doing both versions of each game manual before moving on. Off-topic: What's up with 80s video games naming their heroes "Dirk"? (It's Clyde in TI Runner, so Databiotics renamed him.) Is there a more 80ish first name out there?

Star Runner is really challenging me. The body text isn't a standard typewriter. If Databiotics was desktop publishing these manuals is it possible that they were actually using a TI-99? What printers were available for this machine in 1987? Were there any high-quality daisy wheel printers (not dot matrix, not thermal, etc)? Does anyone know if they had any Mac Pluses in their shop, or even some 68020 Mac? The clip art was coming from somewhere, Mancala is clearly not a hand-sketch (well, half of it's clearly not that) even if a few others might have been some local or semi-amateur artist.

I think the correct way to release these is with a variant for each of "printable" and "digital". Some people (myself included) don't need physical booklets printed out. I haven't had an actual TI-99 since I was in 5th grade after all... I don't even know what happened to it. My son's been playing Alpiner and a few others on Retropie, and it feels weird to not have the manuals (on some of these I honestly can't remember how to play!). Anyway, the printables will be all-white background. For the digitals, I'll use the colored background. It'd be great if you guys could vote on which color to use for each, I can make it anything (it's not really like there was an official color, they used whatever color was cheapest, I guess). I'll also release nice front-cover images too, in case anyone wants just those (on some emulation it gives you a pretty poster in the games menu). Though if someone's offering to do full-color recreations, that'd be great, I can't do anything like that myself. Also, for the title-variants, I think I'll be releasing both of those, and people can choose which they want (or both). I will probably still need help tracking down photographs of those and the like (in the cases where I have a scan of one, a photo of the other might suffice). If anyone has any favorites, just ask, I'm not doing these in any particular order. I had planned on finishing Star Runner tonight, but the first letters of those are using a "swash" variant of Bookman ITC, and I'm having a heck of a time figuring out how to enable those correctly. (Not much of a graphics/typography guy, truth told). I'll be able to lift the warranty from the first manual (no retyping!) but strangely the justification is off just a bit as if DataBiotics re-typed it themselves (word for word). I figured they just photocopier-composited that page in on all of them.

This is my secret weapon. You're seeing the orange "overlay" on the left (original page) so that I can precisely align stuff. The right-hand side is rendered in the app as html. Of course, that's just for the text... I've been using Inkscape to trace out the graphics. I'm shooting for about 4000 bezier nodes (comes out as less than 200kb), but that's tough when it's both line and filled shape. For Spot Shot I just ran two passes for each, and deleted the bad tracing from each and combined them, but for Star Runner it's way worse... I can't get it under about 10,000 nodes. Will balloon the size of that pdf probably. Also, Electron/Chrome (what the app is written with) seems to be screwing up the pdf generation *bad*. When I copy and paste from the pdf, it's somehow reversing the order of all the strings. That may not be an issue for some of you, but if I get that fixed I'll post some links to the better versions here once I get it figured out. Give me a couple of months, and I should have the full Databiotics catalog ready, and I can get to work on the other manuals.

SpotShot-white.pdf Dragonflyer-white.pdf Please keep in mind that with Dragonflyer, I'm working off of Adamantyr's photo, and assuming the contents are identical except for the two references to "Spot Shot". Until someone provides a scan, that's just a guess. Let me know how these print up... I prefer digital for my stuff, and like the 1 page per pdf-page, but that might complicate things if you're trying to print all 4 on a single sheet. Think I'll work on Star Runner next, trying to get the artwork down under 300kb, but it's a tough one. Also, is it the only one that was printed with blue ink?

Wonder if this is pretty close to yours Adamantyr... Dragonflyer-vectorized.pdf The title's still in Cooper Black, but it's higher on the cover. And of course I've just replaced references to Spot Shot with the new title (only 2 of them). Also guys, the copy I found used that green paper, but looking at these photos it's clear that they'd mail them out with various colors (probably whatever was available at the time). Do you have any preferences for what background-color I should use? Should it just be black text on white background?

Wow. I remember ordering these out of catalogs and the backs of magazines... what about the poor schmucks who thought it was a new game and ordered it only to find out it was the same game they already had? I know with certainty that's how my uncle got Picnic Paranoia, and a few others besides.

Assuming it was rebranded lazily, I could probably reproduce it even with a shitty ebay photograph that's distant and perspective distorted. Probably would just release the cover page (assuming the rest didn't change). Which came first though? And who owned it prior to rebranding? What was the point ("Spot Shot" doesn't seem to be stepping on any intellectual property toes)?

Ok, this is pretty close to final for Spot Shot: SpotShot-vectorized.pdf This still has some problems, notably that something about the pdf rendering makes it difficult to select text (I've seen this in pdfs created with other software, still haven't tracked it down). Also, the svg/vector image on the front lets you select each and every little path element, which annoys me. Gotta figure out how to make that so it's just a single image. Fonts are matched. Line-height isn't always matched... on a typewriter it was controlled mechanically, and if the paper slipped a little more or a little less on each new line you'd not get them perfectly spaced. That makes it tough for me. If someone could proof-read, see if they can spot any discrepancies, that'd be great. I'd also appreciate screenshots of it (to test whether the font-embedding is working correctly... would suck if your pdf viewer just shows Times New Roman or whatever). I worked from the one posted in the high score thread, I'll repost it here for convenience: SpotShot.pdf Note that my copy has nearly perfect fidelity, and is only 20% of the original size.

Thank you so much JB. If you want a better digital copy, I think I can do that. I've got two of the fonts matched already, everything except the "Star Runner" though I suspect strongly I'll find it was an included font with Aldus Pagemaker or something like that. The "Minimum requirements" is Palatino Bold, and I'm using JMH Typewriter Dry for the content. Looks like they changed up the warranty page a bit, guess I get to re-type that one, haha. Also, slightly off-topic, why in the hell does CSS not have a sentence-spacing property? Driving me nuts, makes it difficult to get pixel-perfect layout matching. Whoever typed these up liked to double-space new sentences, but the typewriter's pitch was different.

I don't know if anyone's interested in this... but I plan on making them for myself anyway. This is very preliminary work. I'm using a custom-made application called "Chronoscope" that I've never actually released (it was disappointing that I couldn't make it as automated as I might like). The image was vectorized with Inkscape... the latest version has centerline autotrace, which makes the image only about 150k (it's most of the pdf size and will remain so, there's less than 10k of markup/css). I had to hand-tweak it because centerline-autotrace does line art really well, but not solid shapes and combining the two tracings was irritating. I've never been able to figure out automatic typeface detection (so I have to match those by eyeball, and I'm not great at it). So the title on the cover is wrong... I'll get that figured out tomorrow (likely this was made with desktop publishing on a Mac in 1987ish, there really are only a couple dozen possibilities). Chronoscope does OCR (and often badly), so for this I may just end up typing it in by hand, can't be more than 15 minutes' worth or so. The main text of this thing looks typewriter-ish to me, and there are some decent typewriter fonts to use for this. I intend to correct typos and misspellings. I'd go nuts if I didn't (but if someone wants to object, I can be persuaded to provide an alternate version). I also suspect the DataBioTics people were using some standard clipart, but I don't think I've got much chance of finding the originals (if so, this pdf would probably look better still and be under 60k). If anyone has any insight into that, I'd love to hear it. If this doesn't look much different to you, that's what I intended. But if you want to really see the difference just to understand, zoom in on both the original and my version. Crisp, clean lines as far as you can zoom in. On the art and the letters. All criticism welcome. SpotShot-vectorized.pdf

Thank you so much fimbulvetr.

I've managed to find many of these (at least the front page with artwork) via ebay auctions, Google image search, and here on AtariAge (was a little surprised about that, it had been years since I've logged in here). I was hoping to be able to convert the clipart on them to vector format (the latest Inkscape's tracing tools are remarkable), so that I might provide some recreations of the originals for those who would want them. I've had more than a little luck making pdfs that are 100% vector, no OCR or raster. I'm still missing the following: * Jumpy * Star Trap * Spy's Demise * Break Thru (unsure of spelling on this one) * Sorgan II * Star Gazer (unsure on this one?) * TI Toad * Red Baron * Mancala * Intercept * Escape * Dragonflyer Scans (or even bad photographs) of the other pages would be very welcome too. In case I'm missing some on the list and don't even realize it, I have good (or at least usable) copies of * Barrage * Beyond Parsec * Black Hole * Boxer * Burger Builder * D*Station II * Junkman Jr. * Micro-Pinball * Micro Tennis * Midnite Mason * Qmaze I'd also welcome any other manuals that were... how do I put this kindly, less polished? Munchman II comes to mind as an example. Those that were black and white clip art and photocopy folded over and stapled. Any and all help (even just correcting any misconceptions you might notice) would be appreciated.

Well, couldn't find any... decided to make my own.

I apologize if this is the wrong place to ask... But does anyone have (or know where to find) box art for the Trogdor flash game? I know that it's fake (semi-fake? I thought it was available as a downloadable Wii game at some point), but I was hoping someone mocked up box art either here or on Deviant Art. There's nothing on the videlectrix.com website.

I hate to be critical of such work, please don't take my suggestion that way. Digitizing these books is important... they're the sort that are discarded even by libraries. However, it is a very sizable archive. And for most of these books, they could be reduced in size without losing any of the information in the pages. I know that the standard is to digitize these as some raster format (usually jpeg, but for those who want high quality, they generally use tiff) and make PDFs of them. However, such books were usually light on actual images... a diagram here or there, things of that nature. Generally, for a single person, anything other than this would be very difficult... even with OCR, it makes so many mistakes that they can't be corrected by one man. We could as a community transcribe it into html with very little work for any single individual. If each book averages 120 pages, then if you just put up a website where each person proof-reads a page or half a page from OCR, or those who know how if they were to do the markup (wrapping paragraphs in p tags, the occasional img for a diagram, the occasional table)... we could probably complete a book every few weeks. Even with images, I'm betting that most books would clock in under about 3 megs. No matter what though, congratulations and good work. People who work to preserve books, even for niche interests like this, are doing a very good thing. I'd say it was even noble, if it didn't sound so corny.

On Wednesday night, we returned home to find our iMac powered off and a faint electrical smell in the room. It was dead. We dropped it off for warranty repair yesterday, but with the iPhone thing happening today and what with several other similar issues using up their in stock parts, they didn't know when it might be fixed. I'll be letting her use my work laptop to do what she needs to do tonight and such, but I don't think she'll be on as much for a little bit. Hopefully, they'll call me later today to say that they've fixed our computer. Thanks, John O.

Translation: Recently I volunteered to be responsible for two 8bit platforms in a retrocomputing event in Spain, the Atari 8bit and Commodore64. The event is named RetroMadrid and will be held on 8 March 2008 in Madrid, Spain. Despite not being an expert for either platform (especially the Atari 8bit), I promised myself I'd learn enough before the event date and display them correctly. This is because those machines aren't actually represented in this event and I don't know active users of atari8bit in Spain or from another retro-computing event. I tried to find users of this platform in Spain and it was practically impossible, it was the contrary with the Commodore 64. I would like to contact any atari8bit user in Spain for exchanging opinions about the platform and invite them to go to RetroMadrid. To contact me, please send me a private message. This isn't a word-for-word translation, the author offered an english translation that was a little off and I just cleaned it up and used some synonyms that seemed to flow better. The gist of it should be intact. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The Apple II ? It couldn't take over the world its first try, what makes you think it'd do better the second time around? As for Ataris and Commodores both, all we'd need to do is find a Tramiel somewhere, and he could decimate your entire war machine. And TRS-80? Sure, they'd have all kinds of kickass battle robots in the catalogs, but management never realized that they needed to write software for the things, and no one ever bothered to.

While not perfect matches, the Pantone uncoated/matte book has colors that are close. They are visibly off, maybe by a shade or two. Cream - 7527U Brown - 7533U It's hard to tell with the cream if the color is wrong or not, it could just be the paper that makes it look wrong. It is neither too light nor too dark, or if it is, it's only very slightly. The brown is the darkest that the book shows, but still too light to be perfect. No pantone color comes closer though. A more accurate palette will have to wait until I have access to a Pantone opaque plastic book, or some sort of spectrographic device that gives perfect color.

Mostly for curiosity's sake. Way back when, there was an uncommon d-sub type connector, the dd-50. This connector was nearly 3 inches wide, had 50 pins in 3 rows, and the height of the metal shield was taller than all the ones that only had 2 rows of various pin count. I bought one for a buck at Fry's last week. Broke all the pins out of it. (Male) So now it's just the male metal shroud. It is obviously wider than the SIO. Urchlay loaned me a cable briefly, we tried to fit it in... and the cable fits in perfectly snug. The height is the same as the SIO. Better yet, the angle and corner rounding either match, or are close enough. So, only two dimensions are wrong for the shield... the width, and the depth (the female plug should fit in more deeply). It's not like one can be modified. The pin spacing is nowhere close, even if you were to break out extra pins. It's unlikely that another similar part is made but with less pins. But, still potentially useful. If only I could find mechanical specs for it.