Knights & Knaves Alehouse

I'm sure this is old news, but after reading the "AD&D as Literature" topic I looked up info on Traveller and discovered that its publisher has released back editions on CD-ROM.

http://www.farfuture.net/cdrom/

I only wish other companies' games would get this treatment (West End Games and TSR especially... imagine having the entire run of AD&D 1e on a single CD-ROM. It would be almost as good as 40 Years of X-Men...)

But I have a question: I can't help noticing that it has a listing called "FASA and Gamelords" does FASA refer to the company behind Battletech and Shadowrun, or am I getting my hopes up too high? And has anyone read any news announcements about this and have a good idea what it might contain? The page doesn't seem to have a link to an info source....

Thanks.

Fasa and Gamelords both produced supplements for Traveller. Marc is trying to gather the rights to the old supplements from the listed companies/authors in hopes of producing all of the old stuff on CD

What is irratating though about Marc's CD releases is that thus far is that the Classic Traveller and MegaTraveller files on the CD are not all of good quality. Many pages are missing, poorly scanned, blurry, etc. The CDs are supposed to be searchable but if some of the errors that has been reported are true then I don't see how everything is searchable. Another problem in the MT CD is that most of the books were scanned in as black and white and many pages of text is unreadable due to background graphics bleeding through the text.

The main thing though that has kept my money at home is that with the CT CD, all the books are 1st editions and have no errata added so all the original mistakes and omissions are there. If Marc had went with the newest editions of the books and had at least included the remaining errata for them (which wasn't much) then I would have happily bought the CDs. If he ever upgrades them and fixes the problems then I will reconsider.

The Journal of the Travellers Aid Society CD is supposed to be out soon as well.

I have already invested in the big floppy books and have scanned many of my old Traveller books in, converted them to MS Publisher and have them set up on my system for print on demand. Granted the old originals are fairly cheap to get although some are getting harder to find, but I still hate using my originals at the game table when it is easy enough to print up my own copies -- a quick fold and a few staples later I have plenty of LBB digest sized copies for everyday use.

The sad thing is that if you know where to go, you can get all the final printings of the Classic Traveller LBBs that are OCR, editable, searchable, and have copy and paste access. All of them are far better than what's on the CD. Now here's the kicker. Marc used a few of these "pirated" copies on the CD. I still don't know why he just didn't use all pirated copies. If he had done so then the overall quality of his CD would have been exponentially better.

Oh

as for the FASA BT and SR material. Much of it is already available in PDF from the online stores and BattleCorps.

The new scans that FanPro has made are really good. I can't say much for the "other" scans for sale at the online stores. It's really hit and miss and usually a miss IMO.

But you can get most of the old stuff on PDF and burn it to CD yourself. Don't expect much more than Print functionality though for the old books.

My main concern with scanned documents is readability. I don't really care for indexes or search functions much, especially in PDF files. I barely ever use such things.

By the way, how are WOTC's scans of oldschool rules and modules?

Well this is strictly my opinion but I am far less than impressed with most everything for the AD&D, D&D, Battletech, Shadowrun, et al that I have downloaded from the online stores. The reason for this is because the readability for most is terrible. The old D&D and AD&D stuff that is available has been reliably bad for readability IMO. Some of the original scans were not too bad but WOTC pulled many of them off the market, then let a few back onto the market. The re-releases were sub-par. Now I havent bought them all so I cant say 100% for sure you will not find a good copy of x or of y but in my experience I felt lucky to get one good scan out of 5.

All I can suggest is try it. i'm sure someone here has a better idea as to which online store is better for getting older books. frankly put though I would rather pay a few extra dollars, get the actual book on ebay or the like and scan it myself. Thats the only way you can guarnatee a clean readable scan.

Like I said though for the newer stuff say in the past 3 or years for like Battletech and Shadowrun and some of the older books of those lines that have recently been scanned there shouldnt be a problem.

This all of course doesnt apply to OEF ebooks. They started out in electronic format and are made from the electronic format so no scanning ever took place. So when you see the OEF (original electronic format) you know you are going to have a solid PDF.

Just a question, what exactly makes those downloadable scans "bad?"

From your description of the Traveller CDs I would agree--they aren't worth my money (though honestly I wasn't all that interested in the first place--I just wanted to ask about the FASA stuff really).

As it is, right now I'm messing around with my scanner trying to find the settings for best quality while taking only a reasonable amount of disk space.

JamesEightBitStar wrote:By the way, how are WOTC's scans of oldschool rules and modules?

The Dragon Archive CD scans are great. The modules and whatnot are not so good.

Like I said...

JRMapes wrote:The reason for this is because the readability for most is terrible. The old D&D and AD&D stuff that is available has been reliably bad for readability IMO.

Just as the CT books. Blurry, too light, wrong scan settings so you cant see text well if at all, maps all greyed out in sections due to the person scanning not haveing a freaking clue what they were doing, tables completely unreadable because they were afraid to use a resolution that would pick them up acurately because the file would be to big. Idiots. All sorts of things making too many of them a complete waste of time. What is the point of paying any amount for any pdf if you cant read "X" percentage of the pages. Some have a few pages bad, others have almost all pages mucked up. To draw the bottom line, I wont pay for a mucked up piece of work that is unreadable or has sections that are unreadable. I'm not bloody paying for the title -- I want the content.


But ...

JRMapes wrote:Now I havent bought them all so I cant say 100% for sure you will not find a good copy of x or of y but in my experience I felt lucky to get one good scan out of 5.

FYI - I only bought 5 myself. The first one was passable then the next for had huge sections that you simply couldnt read. The looked like they were 8th or 9th generation copies from photocopier to photocopier and so on untill someone finally scanned the old copier copies into a pdf. I won't buy another D&D any edition book or module from any of the online stores. IMO its a complete rip off.

If you are going to scan, look on the web for any of the articles on how to create ebooks/pdfs. Don't piddly around with low res becasue you are afraid of file size. You can compress the scans later. If it takes a 250 or 300 res to get a good scan then use it. If you have color books, scan in color! At worst scan in greyscale but know that i fyou have any text over colors you will have to gamma correct things... so best to just scan in color. Yes it will make large files but this is the age of the 80 Gig HD being standard fare, high speed modems, etc. Larger file sizes are over looked for quality. But don't get crazy either. Only make a pdf as big as necessary - never bigger. Then it is a waste of space. If you have a strictly black and white content book then scan in b&W that is fine. If tghe covers are color then scan only them in color.

Scanning isnt very difficult. Although it is time consuming. However, once you get your settings where they need to be, then it is jsut a matter of repetition, and trust me once you get into a rhythm then it seems to go a lot quicker.

JRMapes wrote:Well this is strictly my opinion but I am far less than impressed with most everything for the AD&D, D&D, Battletech, Shadowrun, et al that I have downloaded from the online stores. The reason for this is because the readability for most is terrible. The old D&D and AD&D stuff that is available has been reliably bad for readability IMO. Some of the original scans were not too bad but WOTC pulled many of them off the market, then let a few back onto the market. The re-releases were sub-par. Now I havent bought them all so I cant say 100% for sure you will not find a good copy of x or of y but in my experience I felt lucky to get one good scan out of 5.

...which is exactly why after purchasing the 1st Edition PHB, DMG, MM, MMII, and FF PDF's from RPGNow.com, I converted them all to Word files. Took me a ton of time though (about 6 months per book--still have to finish the MMII and FF). The OCR functionality of Acrobat just had a hellish time reading the poor-quality scans. And where they hit a table or series of tables in the PDF...egad, but that was pain to get reformatted correctly. Had to completely re-type many of the more complex tables from scratch it was so bad. But in the end, I have legible (and grammatically correct) documents that are truly "fully-searchable", and very portable (about 25% smaller in byte count than the PDF files).

This topic isn't elven, therefore it can be resurrected.

Anyway, so I've taken the advice and have begun scanning in my rulebooks as BMP files (no particular reason, those were just my first choice). So far I've managed one book.

Now, does anyone know any good FREEWARE image-to-PDF conversion software? I've found a great trialware one, but the cost of registration is too high at the moment.

And please, none of those "printer emulator" things. I've tried those.

Thanks in advance.

Just a note that the individual GDW scans available at DriveThruRPG and now RPGNow (via the merger) are *not* the same scans as the ones on the Far Future cds.

The DriveThruRPG scans are consistently better than the scans on the FFE cd-roms. More legiable, better OCR, and more complete. That's saying a *lot* considering how lukewarm some DTRPG scans have been. I don't know they weren't used except for possibly file size to fit all the files on one cd-rom, since the DTRPG scans are usually done in greyscale and AFAIK the FFE scans are done in B&W (smaller file size).

The TSR scans available for sale on DTRPG, RPGNow, etc. are inconsistent in quality. Paizo has the authority to update and correct the same titles but it's slow-going.