Shadowcat on 25/3/2001 at 12:16

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Hi Dan! (Cool beans.)

> As far as I'm concerned, you're welcome
> to do it, though I doubt that my opinion
> carries a lot of legal weight :)

It makes us feel a whole heap better about it, though!!

> I'm pleasantly surprised to find that
> people are still playing this.

I'm sure we're all very happy to have brightened your day, then :)

I think most great games have a tendancy to live on. I'm always amazed that TN still *looks* so good (even if I wished you'd gone the Flight Unlimited route and thrown in an insanely high resolution for the future.)

It maintains a permanent place on my hard drive. (After all, installing it every week would just get irritating :)

You and your team did good. I wish it had sold far more copies, but I'm really glad TN was made.


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Shadowcat
One of Many

Shadowcat on 27/3/2001 at 01:36

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I can provide the storage on the same site I've put the screenshots on.

I think creating a *proper* PDF with the text being real text would be more or less impossible without the original sources for the manual. The two options I can see are:

1) Scanning every page as an image, and creating a PDF (or other format) simply consisting of all the images. This would be the easiest way to go, but would make for a fairly large file.

2) OCRing the text, scanning the screenshots, and creating a simple HTML version with the images embedded. This wouldn't look quite as nice; would take longer to do (we'd have all the spell-checking and editing to do, for starters; I'd be happy to help out there!) but would give a much smaller download, would be easier to read, and probably makes more sense as an online manual format if (1) is the only alternative.


A proper PDF did emerge for System Shock, but I suspect that came from a re-release by Origin/EA. Assuming nothing similar is likely to emerge for TN, I'd recommend option (2).

I'm more than happy to check and edit scanned text if you decide to do it this way. Could we perhaps have a show of hands (as it were) from others who would be willing to help out on such a project?

If you did the scanning and we did the editing, it mightn't be such a big job in the end...



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Shadowcat
One of Many

Shadowcat on 27/3/2001 at 04:39

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I'll have to take a look at the manual when I get home, but I'm thinking that getting real text into a PDF will involve OCRing it, setting the correct font and colours and inserting it into the new page, while ditching any background image that the text might have been over (otherwise you'll have real text over scanned text which would be messy)

It just seemed like additional effort that wasn't really necessary, but if my memory is playing up and there are no background images to complicate things, then hey, why not. It would still be extra work, but the results should be pretty good.

Shadowcat on 27/3/2001 at 23:49

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d'oh. forgot to look at it myself.

The box cover (front and back) can be found at (http://www.mobygames.com/game/covers/gameId=516/) http://www.mobygames.com/game/covers/gameId=516/

blackmesa on 25/4/2001 at 07:00

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The compilation was called Megasixpak by megamedia(info courtesy of mobygames). It included TN as well as Magic Carpet2 among others. I'm sure the manuals were pdf.

I found some for sale but they're all in India. Anybody in India want to pick up a copy? :D

BTW I could never get this to run on my machine. Could someone repost the troubleshooting threads?