That very blog post describes where they got their materials from, most of it comes from Retromags and out-of-print-archive. You can find downloads over at their sites, and those sites usually also upload to IA.
I don't think you can download directly from VGHF as that is not what it's intended for (it's a research tool)
no idea who Frank is (neither do I care) but these files have been readily available for years (and still are), all they're doing is collecting them at a central place and make them searchable (and vievable at a decent speed, compared to IA).
Preservation through proliferation. Should the archive be forced offline, for whatever reason, it will still persist elsewhere, even if its just rotting on somebody's external hard drive, waiting to be found.
Gaming magazines were THE best part of my life growing up. More than the games themselves, more than cartoons, more than family, friends (I had none..the reviewers were my friends :)
We lived in the backwater town of a backwater country, going through a turbulent era. There was nothing to buy there, except local food and produce and clothes. The only foreign stuff available to buy were the absolute basics like soaps and shampoo, and pirated movies and music on cassette tapes (even there people knew and adored Michael Jackson!)
The nearest city with international imports was 10-12 hours away on bus. Sometimes my uncle would go there for work, and the thing I looked forward to the most were the MAGAZINES he would bring back.
I would pore over them again and again, and fantasize about the games in them… it would be months before my uncle went again. So I made wishlists, drew comics about the stuff in those magazines, and learned English and about the rest of the world from them.
At first it was Sinclair User, Your Sinclair, then ZZAP!64. I picked up British humor from them, that still colors mine to this day. :) I learned about Russia, Vietnam, the Falklands and other things that I would not be able to make sense of until decades later.
Every magazine and every reviewer, even the imaginary ones like Chuck Vomit the troll who reviewed text adventure games, had an intensely unique personality that affected how people perceived the games they were reviewing.
The 1980s and early 1990s magazine subculture is the aspect of gaming and computing that those of us who grew up on it sorely miss the most.
Reminder for French-speaking readers: you have access to over 23,000 scanned computer magazines on Abandonware Magazines, including many about video games.
20 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 36.9 ms ] threadI don't think you can download directly from VGHF as that is not what it's intended for (it's a research tool)
So yeah, I'm fine with people funding that
The answer is weaponized scraping.
We lived in the backwater town of a backwater country, going through a turbulent era. There was nothing to buy there, except local food and produce and clothes. The only foreign stuff available to buy were the absolute basics like soaps and shampoo, and pirated movies and music on cassette tapes (even there people knew and adored Michael Jackson!)
The nearest city with international imports was 10-12 hours away on bus. Sometimes my uncle would go there for work, and the thing I looked forward to the most were the MAGAZINES he would bring back.
I would pore over them again and again, and fantasize about the games in them… it would be months before my uncle went again. So I made wishlists, drew comics about the stuff in those magazines, and learned English and about the rest of the world from them.
At first it was Sinclair User, Your Sinclair, then ZZAP!64. I picked up British humor from them, that still colors mine to this day. :) I learned about Russia, Vietnam, the Falklands and other things that I would not be able to make sense of until decades later.
Every magazine and every reviewer, even the imaginary ones like Chuck Vomit the troll who reviewed text adventure games, had an intensely unique personality that affected how people perceived the games they were reviewing.
The 1980s and early 1990s magazine subculture is the aspect of gaming and computing that those of us who grew up on it sorely miss the most.
Here's a link to the magazine archive
https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/