Micro Mart Archive On Everygamegoing

[Dave_E]

A few months ago I bought a massive pile of Micro Mart magazines from eBay and hiked to Cambridge to collect them all. I have been scanning them whenever I had a spare moment and they are now all available here:

https://www.everygamegoing.com/lpublish ... er_art/356

or if you search for Micro Mart (and select Magazine from the dropdown) on the main site.

Recently I have made tremendous progress with a PHP script that can do OCR on pages with a very low margin of error, and you may have noticed that there has been a tremendous increase in magazine articles that I have made available from hundreds and hundreds of old magazines, right through to covering the PS2 and Xbox although I haven't yet done anything later than that.

I suspect most of you reading this will have picked up the odd issue of Micro Mart over the years - it did run for over 35 years. I am making something of an effort to chronicle what's actually in each issue too. Here is an example of how I'm doing it at the moment:

https://www.everygamegoing.com/litem/Mi ... 09/176427/

If you click on Magazine Articles, you get a list of articles and you can click 'Show' to bring up the article. In Magazine Reviews, you get a list of reviews of software (and utilities) from that issue.

I have scanned all the Micro Marts I have at the moment. If anyone has got any issues lying around that they would like to donate to me, I'd be happy to take them off your hands and cover postage. Obviously you can refer to the first link to see if I've already scanned any issues you have (and it will update if I scan any more).

If you're looking for a particular article from Micro Mart I have done a search function of sorts here:

https://www.everygamegoing.com/magIndexSearch/

where you can select Micro Mart and then the type of results you want to see. Note that these are cached pages and so might not be entirely up to date with all my very recent additions. You can also see the results for Micro Mart are huge and include a load of 'Contents' pages which are totally useless.

Finally, there's this overall summary page of *everything* archived by magazine which you might also find useful for Micro User reviews, Acorn User reviews and so on

https://www.everygamegoing.com/showMagazines/

If you might be able to help with building the archive, please shoot me a PM.

[scruss]

I think I must be missing something about Everygamegoing, because all I can ever find on that is covers of things. There are no link or downloads available. I've had several people recommend Everygamegoing, but it has no useful content as far as I can see

archive.org would be a much better choice for a place to put stuff. It does OCR. You can actually download things from it, too

[sweh]

I think I must be missing something about Everygamegoing, because all I can ever find on that is covers of things. There are no link or downloads available. I've had several people recommend Everygamegoing, but it has no useful content as far as I can see

Hmm. It seems to require javascript turned on to work. I went to https://www.everygamegoing.com/lpublish ... er_art/356 and then clicked on the first magazine cover; that popped up a larger image; clicking on that got to https://www.everygamegoing.com/litem/Mi ... 51/175232/ and then on the left menu there's a "Magazine scans" link, which brings up thumbnails of each page; click on the thumbnail and a new tab opens with the scan'd jpg.

At least that's how it works for me on Chrome.

[walkerworks]

In the 31st March 1994 issue of Micro Mart there is an article on Classic Computers which covered the Acorn machines. It even gives the EUG a mention

I no longer have the full magazine but I kept a copy of the article -

Derek

[scruss]

Hmm. It seems to require javascript turned on to work. I went to https://www.everygamegoing.com/lpublish ... er_art/356 and then clicked on the first magazine cover; that popped up a larger image; clicking on that got to https://www.everygamegoing.com/litem/Mi ... 51/175232/ and then on the left menu there's a "Magazine scans" link, ...

Aha, thanks! That worked. A lot of clicks and no prompts to suggest that the larger image went anywhere useful.

It looks like 2015-2016(ish) are on Internet Archive, f'rinstance: [Micro Mart November 2015](https://archive.org/details/Micro_Mart_ ... 5/mode/2up)

[Dave_E]

I think it's accepted netiquette that if there's a smaller image, you may be able to click it to bring up a larger one. I mean I can add a title tag that says "Please click to view the full scan of this page" if you *really* think it's necessary but on a page of scans as 150 x 224 jpgs I just think most people would click the image to see it if they were interested.

If you look at the Magazine Article and Magazine Review links, this lists all the articles from each issue and there's a button that says 'Show' which brings up the page in a pop-up modal also.

I've seen the links to the mags on the Internet Archive (and have indeed downloaded them). However, my archive is in a completely different format, with each page individually scanned. I'm not sure if I completely understand why *everything* should be uploaded to the Internet Archive anyway. The Internet Archive is a great resource to be sure, but as someone who was kicked off Facebook for no reason whatsoever recently and lost some 25+ years of posts, you can understand why I'd much rather upload my stuff to my own site that I have control of, rather than put a load of work into uploading to something someone else controls and one day find it all removed. And if you think that can't happen, then bear in mind that lots of Nintendo and PlayStation magazine runs have indeed been removed from Internet Archive.

I try to design Everygamegoing with the User Experience at the very top of my list so it's quite discouraging when people post that it's not user-friendly but without giving any real advice as to what they'd like to see done differently.

[scruss]

I'm not sure if I completely understand why *everything* should be uploaded to the Internet Archive anyway.

As a backup. What happens if Everygamegoing goes down?

I try to design Everygamegoing with the User Experience at the very top of my list so it's quite discouraging when people post that it's not user-friendly but without giving any real advice as to what they'd like to see done differently.

Fair enough:

• it's not clear to me that a page thumbnail goes anywhere else. Explicit prompting might make me interested in moving my mouse over the image.
• Why are magazines listed as “All Games Published By ABC All Machines”? They're not games. I also only seem to be able to see all copies of a magazine if I select “All Machines”.
• If I'm on a magazine issue page, all the links in the sidebar below “Item” (in red) I have to scroll for. So I don't see that they are there at all. Also, the page flip on an issue page only shows a 150px × 224px preview if I click on it. I can't read that.
• If I link to a sidebar item (say the #mag-scans) for an issue, the link goes to the issue's top-level page. This is very frustrating. It's why I couldn't see the instruction link in your Colour Genie writeup, as the link you posted needed an extra click to go to the actual instructions. How could I guess that?
• On the Machines featured on Everygamegoing landing page, what's the difference between an item (green link) and a thing (red link)?