Nostlan v3.3 : PS1 Open Case View


Changelog:

  • added 1,424 PS1 manuals and 1,685 PS1 discs to Nostlan’s database
  • flip through PDF and CBZ manuals within Nostlan
  • new Liquid Glass app icon for macOS 26
  • new theme for PS1
  • created a CD jewel case Open Case View for PS1 games

Do you guys miss game manuals?

Remember going to the mall to get THE big new game on release day? You couldn’t wait to open the box, not to put the game in your console, which was sitting by your TV back at home, but to read the manual from cover to cover!

When you merely run a game file in an emulator that manual magic is missing. So if you want an authentic retro gaming experience, you gotta have the manuals!

Thus, I’ve wanted to add manual support to Nostlan for years. The trouble was, comprehensive sets of high quality scans simply weren’t available online. That’s changed thanks to the dedicated work of just one guy: Kirkland!

Kirkland’s PS1 Manuals

Kirkland’s Manual Labor is an astounding public resource. Kirkland scanned, page by page, the manuals for every US released PS1 game. “It’s a brutal one man project”, he said. No kidding! We’ll probably never get official digital versions of these manuals from Sony and other publishers, so this archival work is invaluable.

Is it legal? Well for comparison, the for-profit site Vimm’s Lair has been serving manuals, alongside ads, since 1999. Kirkland offers consistent quality without watermarking or ads. Also consider that at a used video game store, you could view the cover, manual, and disc art of a game before making a purchase. This material is copyrighted but it’s mainly promotional, the game is the real product. See Nostlan’s “Legal Info” page for more details.

Kirkland created 1,424 PDFs with 38,820 pages, totaling 27GB!

So if you have 100 PS1 games, Nostlan would download 2GB of manuals. That’s hefty!

It got me thinking, could modern image compression reduce these files in size while retaining quality? Is there a modern “PDF-like” format that supports AVIF?

CBZ conversion

CBZ (Comic Book Zip) is popularly used for digital comics but they’re actually just a zipped folder of images with the extension renamed. Perfect!

Kirkland’s high resolution scanning at 600 and 1200 DPI, captured fine details, including noise introduced by the halftone printing process. Basically, to use less ink, printers print tiny dots of color that blend together when viewed from a distance. The dithering is not part of the original image, it’s technically distortion. In some cases it’s even problematic, producing moiré patterns.

These manuals were meant to be read at arms length, not examined under a microscope, and we’re supposed to see smooth gradients, not dots. Yet, halftone noise is still part of the charm of printed manuals.

I decided to convert the front and back cover images to AVIF at near lossless quality, so they maintain all the texture and character of the original scans. Since the inside pages were usually black and white, converting them to AVIF at default quality still produces excellent results, with big savings in file size. If anything, text looks more legible in the AVIF images because some halftone background noise and JPEG 2000 artifacts around text is smoothed out.

Downloading all 1,424 PDFs took a few days. Then I extracted all the images from the PDF manuals and converted them to AVIF. This intensive process took my PC 20 hours to complete. After that I wrapped them up in CBZ files and had to do a lot of data sanitization and sorting. Of course I can never get things right on the first try and had to redo a lot of this work lol. The final result?

27GB got shrunk to 8GB: a 70% reduction!

Improved PS1 Support

Nostlan’s PS1 theme now matches the colors of the original PlayStation.

Since PS1 games came in CD jewel cases, the front cover of the manual is also the cover art you’d see through the case.

Aside from manuals, I also converted to AVIF and sorted PS1 game discs scanned by WallyWonka and other LaunchBox forum members.

Yet, what good would having all these assets be without an Open Box view?

Well, turns out clear plastic CD jewel cases aren’t so easy to photograph. I opted to pay a professional graphic designer, Design Syndrome, for an extended license to use their CD jewel case mockup.

Nostlan’s PS1 Open Box view supports inlays too! (inserts between the disc try and back cover)

After a month of work on all this, I finally got to see every game in my PS1 collection with a complete set of manuals and discs automatically downloaded by Nostlan. Isn’t that rad?

Manuals in Nostlan

Previously, Nostlan could merely display an image of a game’s manual. Lame!

But now, Nostlan will look for any PDF or CBZ file in the game’s image folder to display as the manual. Select it to start flipping through pages right within Nostlan.

Nostlan smartly detects whether the manual file contains each page as a separate image or two pages per image. No need to fuss with settings.

I also finished the CBZ conversion process on Kirkland’s manuals for SNES and PS2 games and will upload them to Nostlan’s database very soon.

If having these manuals in Nostlan is a big selling point for you, please support Kirkland’s work by donating to him!

“I provide these reprints as a way of keeping these materials alive in the modern age. It’s also my way of making a couple dollars to put towards buying more manuals to provide you, my fellow gamers, with even more manual scans in the hopes of preserving more games.”

Suggestions

Want to discover games you can play on PS1? Check out this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZT3MGuJcNg

Files

Nostlan-3.3.0-win-x64.exe 122 MB
Version 3.3.0 2 days ago
Nostlan-3.3.0-win-arm64.exe 123 MB
Version 3.3.0 2 days ago
Nostlan-3.3.0-mac-arm64.7z 97 MB
Version 3.3.0 2 days ago
Nostlan-3.3.0-linux-x86_64.AppImage 156 MB
Version 3.3.0 2 days ago
Nostlan-3.3.0-linux-arm64.AppImage 157 MB
Version 3.3.0 2 days ago
Nostlan-free-demo-win-x64.exe 122 MB
Version 3.3.0 2 days ago
Nostlan-free-demo-win-arm64.exe 123 MB
Version 3.3.0 2 days ago
nostlan-mac-arm64-free-demo.zip 97 MB
Version 3.3.0 2 days ago
Nostlan-free-demo-linux-x86_64.AppImage 156 MB
Version 3.3.0 2 days ago
Nostlan-free-demo-linux-arm64.AppImage 157 MB
Version 3.3.0 2 days ago

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