
In the introduction video, Salvador discusses browsing their archives and discovering the presence of Pretzel Petea little-remembered early 3D driving/platform video game. Regardless of its severe obscurity, the video game is however discussed in the 1999 E3 brochure and an old concern of PC Gamer, both of which are now memorialized permanently in the VGHF digital archives.
Getting this sort of unknown info into a digitized, quickly searchable kind was “a lot harder than it sounds,” Salvador stated. Beyond getting archival-quality scans of the publications themselves (a procedure assisted by neighborhood efforts like RetroMags and Out of Print Archive), drawing out the text from those pages showed tough for OCR software application developed for the high-contrast, black-text-on-white-background world of service files. “If you’ve ever read a ’90s video game magazine, you know how crazy those magazine layouts get,” Salvador stated.
VGHF Head Librarian Phil Salvador discusses the virtual library launch.
To navigate that issue, Salvador stated VGHF Director of Technology Travis Brown invested months establishing a specifically developed text-recognition tool that “handles even the toughest magazine pages with no problem” and represents “a significant leap in quality over what we had before.” That indicates it’s simpler than ever to discover 81 different discusses of Clu Land from throughout lots of various problems with a single search.
The huge wealth of video game info on deal here does not consist of direct, playable access to retail video games, which libraries can’t share digitally due to the constraints of the DMCA. The VGHF and other companies “continue to challenge those copyright rules every three years,” leaving some hope that virtual libraries like this might quickly consist of access to the source product being talked about.
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