I'm currently batch ripping the manuals I have to PNG with 300DPI.
Sadly, some of these scans are pretty low quality to begin with, so no matter what I do with them they're never going to be perfect. It's kind of ironic that aside from the NES Classic Mini manuals that I got my hands on, the Japanese manuals in the collection are generally in much higher quality than the US manuals. This is due to the fact that the Japanese scans are far more recent and there was much better and cheaper technology to get them done than when these US manuals were scanned. I find it kind of hard to believe that nobody ever really upgraded the US manuals in all of this time. Most of them seem to be the exact same ones that I had a decade ago with a few exceptions.
Even though they're much larger in disk space real estate at 300DPI in PNG format, I feel this is the way to go. Edits can then be made at any time to them without degrading the quality.
Some things I'd love to do at some point with these images are as follows:
Split the 2-page scans so every image is a single page.
Make all manual images the exact same size.
Clean up the images.
Ideally, with a lot of work, a ton of cleaning up could be done to these and many of them have the possibility of one day being as high quality as the NES Classic Mini scans. I don't know if I'd ever do this though, but after splitting the images I would at least like to remove the creases and staples from the bindings, as well as clean up the other three edges of the images.
This doesn't sound too bad when I'm looking at an 8 page manual, but it seems rather daunting when I'm looking at one of the manuals that are over 50 pages.... and then I start thinking about how I have about 1,000 more of these to do. :(
At any rate, it's never going to happen on my end with my current PC. Messing with files like this slows my work down to a crawl and I spend more time waiting on my PC than actually working and it just drives me crazy. At least with the PDF files ripped to the PNG/300DPI format, separated by folder and numbered correctly all of the materials will be there if I ever get a chance to upgrade my rig and decide to tackle this project.
In other news.... I re-ran the gamelist.xml script last night and I'm over 1/3rd of the way toward reversing the process for the 2nd time back to the [synopsis].txt files. So far out of around 700 txt files, 72 of them were different because of the new code changes I made the other day, and none of those differences were undesired or unexpected.
Differences so far on 2nd re-run are as follows:
Removed extra blank spaces at end of lines in Description: 69
Removed 2 extra blank lines at the end of the Description when there was no URL citation: 3
Once this is done re-running this time, I'll have 2,118 unique NES/FDS [synopsis].txt files with absolutely no strange characters or formatting errors that will look wonderful on the XBox.
Oh, and anybody that hasn't been following along... These new synopsis files are no longer the novels of information that nobody read that they used to be. Every one of them is 1kb or less in total, and the Game Descriptions now read like the "exciting" text you'd see for the game on the back of the box, or the story in the manual, or on an advertisement for the game.
For example:
The classic tale of horror comes to vivid life in this fast-moving video game! Dr. Jekyll succeeds in separating a man's personality into GOOD and EVIL - but he experiments on himself! Now, without warning, the kind Dr. Jekyll transforms into the monstrous Mr. Hyde. Follow Dr. Jekyll as he fights off enemies in hazardous 19th century London, only to be suddenly plunged into Mr. Hyde's World of Demons! But the excitement doesn't end there - as you do battle in each of the two worlds of this game, the worlds themselves are struggling with each other for control! Which will triumph - GOOD or EVIL? DR. JEKYLL or MR. HYDE?
Sure it's all lies, but it does make it sound like a game you'd want to play. :)
