Digitiser

Cool, I had intened to do something like this myself someday. I spent quite some time organising all of those digitiser pages some time ago, uploaded here; rghost.net/58595874 --Pirate Dragon (talk) 14:50, 18 October 2014 (CDT)

I'm still not entirely sure what the best course of action is for the rest of the pages, i.e. non-reviews that might talk about Sega. Obviously a lot of it isn't relevant, but some of it might be, since it was probably the most regularly updated news service before the internet took off. There's coverage of various trade shows like ECTS which isn't well documented, and one of the many elephants in the room - official and regularly updated sales charts.

Food for thought -Black Squirrel (talk) 15:18, 18 October 2014 (CDT)

Digitiser went online towards the end of 1996, with an archive of game reviews from 1995/6. http://www.web.archive.org/web/19980114175043/http://www.teletext.co.uk/digi/vault/vaulta.htm (replace the last "a" with another letter for reviews beginning with that letter). However, I don't think later reviews have been archived (internet archive doesn't like drop down menus). Features archive; http://www.web.archive.org/web/19981205191025/http://www1.teletext.co.uk/digi/darc.htm . Stuart Cambell also has all of his monthly digitiser articles up on his website; http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/world/digi.htm . So there's a fair amount of Digitiser content that has been preserved. I'm not sure what the best course of action is with the rest of the content either, maybe organise each week's content into pdfs? Reviews were updated Mon-Fri, with a summary of that week's reviews on the weekend. Similar for News, with articles on the weekend. Charts updated every Wednesday (covering the week ending the previous Saturday). Incidentally the charts section also has Digitiser's review scores for some games where the actual reviews haven't been archived.

As for the UK charts, that's a project I've been working on and off on for several years. Unfortunately most magazines rarely put the actual date for the week covered in their charts (and most put the previous issue's position rather than the previous week's), so it's a huge pain to cross reference them to be able to work out the correct order, which is essential in order to establish actual UK release dates. The Digitiser charts are quite helpful in that regard as it's fairly simple to work out the week by the date on the page (although sometimes there were errors and other times the charts didn't get updated some week, so it's not perfect) and they also give the previous week's position. Still, that is terribly incomplete. Sonic the Comic is the most comprehensive source for UK Sega charts, they published them every fortnight from 1993-1997, but those were written quite sometime in advance of publication, again with no date given for the chart. They're not evenly spaced out every two weeks either, somtimes back to back, other times with several weeks gap. I've collated them here; http://www.rghost.net/58610876 It's interesting to see the chronology of UK releases even without the actual dates (Mega CD launch period is informative as it gradually fills the chart to a Top 10). A few 1996 charts with dates here; http://web.archive.org/web/19970220091858/http://www.paragon.co.uk/charts/archives/index.html . If these ever all get organised into order I'm not sure how or if those should be added to Sega Retro, there's probably about 1,000 different official UK Sega charts across the six formats and ten years that they covered.--Pirate Dragon (talk) 12:01, 19 October 2014 (CDT)

My thinking is to collate each publication's charts, possibly on separate pages, and eventually use that to produce a separate, "best guess" chart. In theory the numbers should line up - if nothing else it should help us track down games to the nearest month. It's unlikely to be super-accurate, but it's better than nothing I suppose.

I avoided PDFs in this context because the program I use turns PNGs into JPEGs, which makes things bloated and ugly. I'd be tempted to do it the old fashioned way, i.e. separate PNGs and a gallery. Also because it's not like a book where the chapters are in a specific order - it's more like a collection of books which are only a few pages long each. -Black Squirrel (talk) 12:55, 19 October 2014 (CDT)