Spectrum Computing

pavero wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 7:08 pm I think there is wonderful. There is for the first time in my life when I have two separate pages in some magazine.

Cheers pavero! Though I was a little surprised how you didn't publish even a single map in your Playing Tips section

I'm finally getting around to reading this now. Fantastic work, XTM!

XTM wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 7:31 pm

pavero wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 7:08 pm I think there is wonderful. There is for the first time in my life when I have two separate pages in some magazine.

Cheers pavero! Though I was a little surprised how you didn't publish even a single map in your Playing Tips section

Surely it will be in the next issue.

XTM wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 11:21 pm Alright, replying to various people in order of posting:

@Vampyre

Sorry, no print version from me, if you want one you have to make it yourself. Or ask Mark R Jones how he did his. I'd assume he cut the each of the double-page files into two halves in some proggy like Photoshop, then rearranged them to the typical (for 12 pages) format "1 2 11 12", "3 4 9 10", "5 6 7 8" on 3 sheets printed on both sides, then stuck the whole thing together.

I just printed them out (on both sides of the page 1 at a time) and stapled the whole lot together.

I put together a PDF-File "in Booklet-Format": Could be printed on A3 Paper:

(I´ve done it with Adobe Reader from the original PDF-File in two steps:
1) Resized pages which seems to be A5 to A4 (with Options Size / Adjust and Page Size A4) in Adobe Reader)
printing into a new PDF-File.
2) "Printed as Book" as described here: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/prin ... eader.html
into a new PDF-File called "Crap_2020-06_DIN_A3_Book.pdf" with PDFCreator).

Download here: https://www.magentacloud.de/lnk/s5CFAWAH

btw. [mention]XTM[/mention] Thanks a lot for mention in this issue. I just yesterday find time to read all through this fab issue of CRASH

Only just discovered this thread. It's a couple of years old but I think this is incredible and I wanted to bump it, in case others hadn't seen it!

I honestly thought this would have been last year at the latest. Those years have flown by!

If I ever were to do another one, I'd totally have to include the review for a fake game for you, @Vampyre : The First Of Us

@Lee Bee thanks for bumping - it probably would have taken me ages to find this otherwise.

@XTM great stuff - just from a quick flick-through, it brought back memories of reading the 'real' Crash magazine from back in the day. The layout and text flow are much more professional than anything from the Annuals, at least. Did you actually put the whole thing together in Photoshop?

Thanks for the praise. I also have to thank Lee for bumping this I guess, it gets a "new lease of life" so to speak as plenty of members have joined after I posted this.

I guess I could give some background info ...

The reason it looks so authentic is that I sort of cheated - I scanned in select pages (Reviews, Forum, Playing Tips and so on) from my own Crash issues, then emptied the text boxes but also moved them around or changed their size (or even added new ones/removed some). The reason I did it this way was to keep the typical "signs" of an original 80s mag, like for example the lines that surround boxes or between the text columns, which I assume were hand-drawn by the layout team back in the day. All the while carefully trying not to do anything that would have made it look "modern" and thus ruined the illusion. Also, the graininess of the paper and making it look old, very important. I typed out the exact text from an original review on a new layer above the base text, then changed all the various text options (size, letter spacing, letter weight, font type and so on) until it matched the original as closely as possible and all words would be on the same positions as in the original below. Then I could write my own texts.

It was indeed all done in Photoshop. I know it's not proper layout software as people would use something like Indesign for that, but I simply do not have any software like that. In Photoshop you don't have a function to break up a word into a second line (like for example inter- face) so I had to do them all manually, which was indeed a bit of a faff.

Anyway, I have done something similar for a German retro community last year, this time it amounted to 42 pages (link here - well, it's all in German, but at least you can get an idea what it looks like) but it was MUCH less enjoyable than working on the Crap parody; over the course of more than two months, I had to wait for people to send me review texts and screenshots (many waited too long so I got super busy and stressed out near the deadline), ended up having to proofread for everyone as apparently no one is capable of spellchecking, I found mistakes in literally every single article I got sent. Very annoying, and thus, never again.
The Crap parody on the other hand I did all by myself in the time span of about a week and a half, and much time was spent trying to come up with witty text, which I enjoyed the most - I wanted to make it all sound like it was written by native speakers of English. See, even an "unfunny" German can do this (as everyone thinks we are apparently the least funny nation on Earth, but what do they know)

@XTM I am beyond impressed at how you put this together. Having worked 20+ years in magazines, it would be an absolute nightmare of mine to have to lay out text pages in Photoshop. I'd even take Illustrator in preference if InDesign wasn't available. Hell, MS Publisher would probably be less of a headache. The last Photoshop layout job I saw that impressed me this much was a tour brochure put together by an independent tour guide operating around Auckland, NZ. My jaw dropped when he told me how he'd done it.

How on Earth did you get the column separator lines so straight if you scanned original pages? That alone has been a bête noire for me: next to impossible to get anything dead straight on a scanner, and fixing the angle within Photoshop never gets it so perfect. Did you just redraw them? The time and effort put into this is the very definition of 'painstaking'... emphasis on 'pains', from my point of view.

But the end result is very effective - the scanned paper texture really does help to make it look authentic.

Re: spellchecking, it's often not much better if you're doing it professionally. I've worked with Editors who were functionally illiterate, let alone writers!

Wow, this was a really high quality parody! Very entertaining too, thanks.
I really want to see all those games made as CSSCGC entries.

HEXdidnt wrote: ↑Wed Mar 15, 2023 10:46 pm@XTM I am beyond impressed at how you put this together. Having worked 20+ years in magazines, it would be an absolute nightmare of mine to have to lay out text pages in Photoshop. I'd even take Illustrator in preference if InDesign wasn't available. Hell, MS Publisher would probably be less of a headache.

How on Earth did you get the column separator lines so straight if you scanned original pages? That alone has been a bête noire for me: next to impossible to get anything dead straight on a scanner, and fixing the angle within Photoshop never gets it so perfect. Did you just redraw them? The time and effort put into this is the very definition of 'painstaking'... emphasis on 'pains', from my point of view.

Well, it wasn't too bad since I wasn't really under any pressure (as in being "on the clock") and could take my time. In fact I've never done any of this professionally, it's all just self-taught by trial and error and to be honest I wouldn't even want to do it for a living, I can't stand sitting in an office all day.

The scans were fairly straight to begin with but I know what you mean, you'll always be a tiny bit off. Well, the solution is very easy: I created a rectange the vertical size of a column (or separator line) above the scan layer. Then I simply rotated the scan layer using the rotate function in free transform until it was perfectly aligned with the rectangle above. On some pages I also copied the separator lines with a slightly smoothed selection edge (I use German Photoshop so I don't know all the command names in English) and rotated or moved them as needed. Due to the smooth edge it would still be seamless.

Yes, some it was painstaking but I always waste time fiddling about with details anyway, even when drawing stuff in Photoshop - though it does suck a bit for digital drawing, Clip Studio Paint and Paint Tool Sai are my "weapons of choice" for that.

Kweepa wrote: ↑Thu Mar 16, 2023 6:48 amWow, this was a really high quality parody! Very entertaining too, thanks.
I really want to see all those games made as CSSCGC entries.

Well, I think you can buy some of them from Scumsoft in Scunthorpe, though I'm not sure if they're still trading

I've had a detailed look through this now and really think this is superb, both in content and execution! Great attention to detail.

As a designer, I agree that laying out text like this in Photoshop would be a nightmare. Then again I do know designers who work this way all the time! And it all needs to end up in Photoshop anyway so you can make it look like a real magazine

This forum may be small but it sure has plenty of creative talent. Pete Prodge did something similar lately with his fake TV listing!

What's the deal with that Fantasy World Dizzy mag, were you involved?

Yeah, I've seen that fake TV listing. I didn't respond with a post (mostly because it was about British TV programmes I don't know much about) but the "heart" icon shows that I pressed it. Hey @PeteProdge, is your Our Sinclair or whatever you were going to name it ever becoming a reality?

XTM wrote: ↑Thu Mar 16, 2023 10:22 pm What's the deal with that Fantasy World Dizzy mag, were you involved?

Sorry bud, just my little joke, a fake-title cover I made for the "Out Of Context Spectrum Games" thread. Thought you might appreciate it. Fake documents and images is something I love and have made many over the years. Here's another, and an old one

Heh, this is turning into our little gfx banter thread now.

Good thing I know Little Britain, otherwise I may not have recognized that "egg".
The Obama is ace, nice attention to the correct shadows.

I've done tons of Photoshops, not just fakes, all kinds of funny things. Here is a very simple one, it is a German magazine for PC tips and tricks. In the original, there wasn't a blue screen.
But come on, this pic was so asking for it, wasn't it? The hand gesture! Holding a disk in the other hand! The face which I see as a cynical grin out of amused disbelief: OF COURSE this piece of trash had to spit out a blue screen just as he was about to save his work! (I'd say he only lost 10 minutes worth of work, otherwise he'd probably have a different expression on his mug)

Edit: I also like how he looks like Nicholas Cage!

LOL that is absolutely hilarious!

I just found the original photo!

Nice, complete with that dark afterglow/synchronize effect (I'm not sure what it is called but I see it below the Speccy 128 menu).

Okay, last one for tonight. While you down-/upgraded the PC to a Speccy, I was looking at my Photoshops folder and found a page from an 80s German Mickey Mouse comic which I had scanned, cleaned up, and re-texted with some weird story absolutely yonks ago. So I decided to shoehorn some SC related nonsense into the text boxes, only took 10-15 minutes or so ... the Ashens video I mention in the text can be watched here.

LOL! I want to read an entire book of that Disney cartoon! You write so well, I'd never know you were German.

I've done similar things myself in the past with comics though I'd better not share them

XTM wrote: ↑Thu Mar 16, 2023 11:40 pm Nice, complete with that dark afterglow/synchronize effect (I'm not sure what it is called but I see it below the Speccy 128 menu).

I think it's just called the scanning.

XTM wrote: ↑Thu Mar 16, 2023 10:22 pm Hey @PeteProdge, is your Our Sinclair or whatever you were going to name it ever becoming a reality?

Well, someone pointed out in the thread that there already existed a ZX Spectrum podcast called Our Sinclair, so I considered I couldn't clash with that brand, so I renamed it More Sinclair...



..and sadly it's been stuck in development hell really. I don't have enough time to devote to writing these things on a quarterly basis, so if it comes out, it'd be like an annual, although not many annuals are just 36 pages!

About four pages were completed over a couple of spare days. It's not so much the layout work that creates a challenge, it's the need for researching things so that the copy is accurate and filled with decent insights.

There's a page on a certain trilogy of games which I manage to spin into several quickfire gags. I'm thinking of using that in the hour-long comedy show I intend to perform early next year at Leicester Comedy Festival. (It's all about the history of computer games.)

I totally hear you on the "researching" bit. This Crap mag here pretty much only exists because I had a bunch of silly ideas that spun out of control, resulting in a mag full of made up ... crap. Not having to do much in the way of research or getting facts right and not having to be sensible not to step on someone's toes when reviewing their latest game was liberating. Maybe that's the route you should have taken too ...

XTM wrote: ↑Sun Mar 19, 2023 4:15 pm I totally hear you on the "researching" bit. This Crap mag here pretty much only exists because I had a bunch of silly ideas that spun out of control, resulting in a mag full of made up ... crap. Not having to do much in the way of research or getting facts right and not having to be sensible not to step on someone's toes when reviewing their latest game was liberating. Maybe that's the route you should have taken too ...

Yeah, this came out of love for the silly side of Your Sinclair, while also appreciating the ZX Spectrum scene. I wanted to do justice to both, but yeah, should have really kept to the comedy side. Thing is though, I'm aware it wouldn't have been much just being a load of 'wibble'. Too niche!

PeteProdge wrote: ↑Sun Mar 19, 2023 3:36 pm

Didn't know about this but looks great! I've said before I thought the Doodlebugs are too good not to be memorialised in some kind of publication. Same goes for your own threads—all that research, copy, lists, it's quality content that could easily fill a magazine or two.

Good luck with this, and take your time. There's no rush to complete. The Speccy community are in for the long haul!