Rx Manual Restoration Project (NES/Famicom/FDS)

... or Finishing what Vimm's Lair started back in 1999.

Hey everybody. First time poster, LONG time lurker.

After years of being away from emulation and emulation related projects, I came back after the announcement of RHDN's closing back in August. Although I knew this wouldn't be the end of hacks and translations, it gave me a clean break point to actually finish some projects that I've been working on for the better part of 25 years.

The state of manuals was always a problem for me, but until around October of last year, I never dove into it to fix any of it. Since then I've gotten together with a few other people who have made some really high quality scans that I could restore, and at this point we have a near complete set of Famicom and FDS manuals as well as finally completing the US licensed set when I got Servo at PixelatedArcade to scan the Licensed Tengen manual for RBI Baseball in February.

I'd like to know a little bit about the history of this project and its Genesis. I plan on creating a "manual" for the set with thanks to people/sites that contributed even if they didn't know that they did, and since I believe that the origin of this collection effort began here, I'd love to know more about it.

I know I've seen various collections floating around for decades now, and places like EmuMovies love throwing their watermarks on other people's work. I want to make certain that people know who really started this project, and any website that put watermarks on their stuff are not getting any shoutouts on this.

Here's a sampler of restorations that I just uploaded to archive today: https://archive.org/details/ressurection-x-manual-restoration-project-nes-fds-sampler

And a sample of a single restored Famicom Manual: https://archive.org/details/circle-of-heaven-hell/page/n15/mode/2up

The entire collection now has around 1,680 entries. 108 of those are "Cover Only" images I grabbed from photos off ebay and fixed in Paint.NET. Most of those missing manuals are from Aftermarket games over the last 10 years as well as obscure bootleg games, and only around a dozen or two are from officially licensed games. At this point, I have had my hands on over 37,000 pages since October. That's not including double-work, which I'm still doing now. I've done at least 2,000-3,000 more pages twice after getting high quality FDS scans that I'd already worked on based off of much lower quality scans.

(Oh... and it should be noted that my intention wasn't to restore ALL Famicom manuals, but only the ones for games that don't need to be translated to English, or those that got a full translation at RHDN over the years).

Also, although I'm pretty damn proud of the work here, I should state I'm not a professional and I've never had any training for any of this. I'm also unable to afford any legit programs, so Photoshop was out of the question. I tried using Gimp, but that was over my head, and Paint.NET was about a perfect fit for me since it was free and the learning curve wasn't so steep.

This will be released as one complete set on archive. You will simply be able to install Calibre, if you don't have it already, and just import the download and everything is all set up for you.

Thanks to everyone here who ever scanned a manual for the rest of us!