Category: archiving

LEGO Shop At Home Scans: 95-99

A while back, I was trying to find a specific Lego catalog that I’d looked at as a kid. However, when I tried to find the specific one I was looking for, I realized that very few of these catalogs from the 90s had been immortalized by the internet. However, many of them where on sale for reasonable prices (and Sabrina wanted a Scanner for old family Photos anyway) so I got to work.

? 1995

Holiday 1995

January 1996

Holiday 1996

Spring 1997

Summer 1997

Holiday 1997

January 1998

Spring 1998

Summer 1999

Fall 1999

The raw files are here on my archive.org account, if you find my (largely imagemagick-powered) PDFing of the files inadequate. If the PDFs appear small just zoom in, they’re about as high-res as they can be without creating artifacts on the screens I tried. I plan on also scanning the ones that I personally saved when I was a kid, and will post those here too.

And the specific catalog I was looking for? Turns out it was Holiday 1997. Twenty one years ago. The page I was looking for in particular turns out to be this one.


SYLP is dead, long live SYLP

emf.sdf.org, or “The Shipyard Liberation Project” hasn’t been updated in years. This is mostly because I haven’t had anything to add to it-I think I got every last graphic I could, contacted everyone who’s email address still worked, etc. I’d also all but run out of space for my SDF account (I even had to host the 3d models from Ares on my own site.) Somewhere along the line, I lost access to my SDF account, but by then I was using Unix every day so I didn’t really miss it.

Fast-forward to now, I’ve realized that the fine folks at the Internet Archive have a sweet upload utility that allows you to upload whatever files you want, and (critically) add metadata to them so that some sort of context can be preserved. So I’ve uploaded those files to the archive, you can enjoy them here. That puts out the “what if SDF deletes my account” fire, but some stuff remains:

  • Files with appropriate licenses ended up on OpenGameArt rather than on SDF because I figured more people would see/use it. They ought to be mirrored on the archive.
  • Someone from the Ambrosia forums kindly ripped the graphics from a TC called “The Novel One.” I’ve got the graphics somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find the thread.
  • The “Open Source TC” had some assets at some point, and the notion was that anyone could take it and run with it. I’ve never run across a copy of it (it was hosted on DropBox of all places)
  • The list of missing shipyards on the SDF site still stands – if anyone out there has any of those graphics, I’d love to see them!