Supplemental Material Preservation (Manuals, Feelies, etc...)?

[Gary_Oak]

Considering how game manuals (and feelies as well) played an integral part of a game experience back in the day (due to size constraints, most video games from the late 70s 'till late 90s couldn't explain a game's mechanics or plot, confining most of that info (often vital) to a manual for the player to read before playing their respective game), I was wondering if there was some kind of long-term plan to preserve those as well.

I believe near, bsnes/ares creator, at one point sought to do this with the entire SNES/SF game library. Alas, the task proved to be too monumental for a single person to handle, so those plans ended up on ice (not sure if the current emu developers have plans to continue that idea in their place).

Part of the reason as to why I ask this is because, for a lot of the Amiga games we have preserved here, many of them are unplayable without their respective game manual or code wheel because of copy protection measure (the AGA version of James Pond 2, often considered to be the definitive version of the game in question, can't be played without consulting the manual to deal with the copy protection check). As of this time of writing, there are no scans of the AGA version's manual.

Another example is Flashback (again, on the Amiga). There is a very specific move that only the game manual explains in order to progress through a certain area (this was deliberately done to "punish" those who pirated the game).

While I realize the most of these issues are arguably solved thanks to places such as Game FAQs and derivatives, I feel that these kinds of supplemental material are just as important to preserve as the games themselves.

[rarenight]

Important manual preservation work is well underway by VGSC members like Kirkland and there are existing datted attempts like Replacement Docs (http://www.replacementdocs.com/news.php) or TOSEC-PIX (https://www.tosecdev.org/) or Emu Movies (https://emumovies.com/), but I agree that archival-quality manual datting isn't where it needs to be. Down the line I was thinking of exploring this idea by further fleshing out https://datomatic.no-intro.org/index.ph ... arch&s=302, but other projects take precedence.