Laserschwert

I know, AI is a controversial topic, and for many things, I'm really hesitant towards it as well. But when it comes to image restoration, it feels like it's a blessing. Will it bite me in the ass in the long run? Let's hope not! With the help of AI, I was able to reconstruct the Last Crusade box background image (a blurry desert shot, for which I never found the original source) a lot faster and cleaner than before. Furthermore, I've utilized the original promo photo of Ford and Connery, extending it ever so slightly on the right side via AI (the original photo ends pretty much where it does on the original box). Of course, there's still a lot of manual clean-up, masking and color-correction involved, so thankfully this hobby is still giving me something to do. Edit: I've included the sources I've used for the logo, a floppy scan from the LC Action Game (utilizing the same INDY logo as the Adventure Game), and the FM Towns version, for the full logo. Both found on Mobygames (scans by Servo and hoeksmas). The original box scan was provided by TomVDJ years back in this thread. The next step will be adding the marbled paper frame and building several different versions of the poster. Edit: What the hell, here goes. With the tagline rebuilt from scratch (That's "Matrix II Bold" at 45% width, by the way):

I've got a similar one as a gift from a German LucasArts fan with a knack for designing custom big boxes (he offered one to me, since he used my restoration). I think he came up with the design first and the guy above just expanded on the idea (by, well, stealing it). This is the one I have: He also designed this one: They are both empty though (and he only ever sold them at cost, not to make money off of them). Is it presumptuous to assume that our mini-run of MI SE boxes (as seen above left) kicked off several more of these kinds of projects? At least I can't say I've seen many custom big boxes including goodies appear online before that.

Damn, you're on a roll here!

Ah what the hell, here's another one:

And it's been updated.

You might have noticed that that's my YT channel 😉 Anyway, that arrangement takes a few liberties too many though. Should I do a remastered soundtrack, I'd like to stick at least a bit closer to the original track. Edit: Cheeky bastard 😀

So, I gave the DOTT main titles track a try: Edit: Mh, compared to the in-game track, the MIDI rips seem to be missing certain parts or instrument lines. Gotta investigate further.

Yeah, there's another hour of music missing, so not even close to finished I'd love to do DOTT at some point, but more projects than free time already makes this one take ages.

Nice find! I've added it to the description of the track. By the way, by now I've added even more tracks to the soundtrack, with the most recent ones (still months old, oops) being: Wack-a-Rat Trixie's Trailer BumpusVille The Bodyguard and the Robot Who's John Muir?

These are so good. I think the Royale ones are my favorites.

ScummVM has different shaders for CRT overlays or dither removal. But I don't know if these could be leveraged on a web page. Apart from that, though, it's trivial to just batch-apply a CRT filter to all files (or run them through other tools for some fancier cathode ray simulation).

When I open the PDF in Photoshop, I can choose to open individual images from it. And all images show up with indexed palettes.

Something I've noticed missing are the credits/menu/inventory backgrounds for several games (CoMI, EMI, MI2, S&M come to mind). Maybe some of those aren't that interesting to look at, but for preservation's sake, all of them should be included. Plus, you should probably include clean versions without foreground overlays (like the parallaxes) or sprites (like the cannon "game" from CoMI).

I agree, the ideal presentation would be in the form of a more elaborate website or app. I'm thinking of features like thumbnails and light box view, but also the ability to zoom into the images, switch between different versions of the same background, toggle aspect ratio correction, maybe simulating a CRT screen, etc. Edit: Ah, screw it, I converted them all. Acrobat created a bookmark for each page, named after the file, so those names are still intact as well. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1C3v3cQNGdU6qgElSDKxen5OeU1OtGUNF?usp=sharing

Either way, uploading them as PDFs would still make sense, just from a backup perspective. As a test, here are the backgrounds from SoMI EGA / Zak FMT / CoMI compiled into PDFs. The files are still in their original formats, with - from what I can tell - their palettes fully intact.

While that would take care of the archival part, it wouldn't increase user-friendliness. At least having it as a PDF would allow easier browsing and previewing.

Regarding archive.org, it might work by putting the PNGs of each game version into a PDF and uploading those. Sure, it has that "take a screenshot, paste it into Word, print it out, scan it into a PDF"-vibe, but that would a) keep the PNGs uncompressed, and b) make them browsable all the way from thumbnails to full-screen zoom.

I rebuilt the logo using the main poster. It's slightly different from the ones floating around the web, so now it matches the one in the actual ad. It looks like they painted out some of the coordinate grid from the map (probably to not clash with the text overlay). I might do that eventually.

I'm using nothing fancy, an Epson Perfection V39. The important part for me was a removable lid, so that it doesn't get in the way when scanning larger stuff. I'd love to have a bigger scanner, but those are much pricier. And since I don't scan THAT much myself (I'm relying on collectors scanning their stuff for me), it wasn't worth the investment yet. But yeah, an A3 scanner, with a removable lid, AND an as-thin-as-possible bezel around the glass (this one's the most difficult one) would be fantastic. As a little update as to what I'm working now, I'm creating more color variations for the Fate of Atlantis map: (Beauty / Box / Manual / Poster / Print Ad) Putting hands on the map again, I've used that last color variant to rebuild one of the FOA print ads that ran in magazines back then:

Amazing project! So many times I've been searching for a specific background, so this is perfect.

Yeah, if this is acceptable on the Mojo forum, I might make another thread for non LucasArts posters.

Here are three versions, cropped slightly on the sides to fit a 3:4 aspect ratio, in clean/logo/credits flavors.

Robert Florczak

Only 2.5 years later, I've finally made my own cleanup: I'll do a logo version eventually.

Of course. Galactic Gallery (who are exhibiting most of his originals) posted a higher-res photo of it back then, which my current restoration is using.