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So after around 40-50 hours of work over a few weeks I have finally completed the restoration of the Stunt Rally intro as found on the DVD-ROM release. There were multiple issues with the intro such as the colors being overly green with blacks looking especially green, plus the issue of encoding errors from the 25p video being converted to PAL DVD which outputs at 50i. Other errors were seen as the video changing from progressive to interlaced, what I mean by this is that with deinterlacing turned off some sections of the video would play just fine, it would show the same frame twice but then it would suddenly switch to interlaced footage and you'd see the lines of an interlaced frame that wasn't deinterlaced. When this happened there would be a transitional frame which would cause the video to freeze for a single frame, this happened quite a few times near the start resulting in the audio becoming out of sync when corrected. Towards the end this issue is very apparent as the video begins to bounce up and down due to constantly changing from progressive to interlaced and back again. A frame showing the black of Sid's car as looking very green, also note how the jungle in the background has a minor green glow to it. The same frame after color correction and upscaling to 1440 x 1080, while the blacks are much better the green cannot be fully removed due to the blacks being rendered more green than the surroundings. (below) A frame that is a transition between progressive and interlaced playback. The next frame which has jumped down by a pixel but is now playing as progressive and has no field issues. Although a seemingly crude method I used MPC media player to play the extracted intro which was a lossless rip and go frame by frame print screening the video. If opened and left alone MPC will display a video in its native resolution in the center of the screen so the frames that were pasted into GIMP2 were 768 x 576, 4:3 PAL DVD resolution. Luckily there were a few sections of the intro in the "behind the scenes" video that were of superior quality than those in the intro file itself, including the close up scenes of Baron and Brad but without the interlacing and bouncing issues, so these files were used instead since less work had to be done to fix the frames. I did look into the possibility of extracting the frames from the data of the video using ffmpeg but this only resulted in giving me 1800 images from the top field and 1800 from the bottom, plus these images were not separated and would have required manual separation taking weeks if done that way. Since MPC displays the video exactly as is with these same frames but already deinterlaced and identical quality as the manually extracted frames it was decided to simply use the video itself and go frame by frame print screening. The screen image was then pasted into a template already set at 768 x 576 so all I needed to do was line up the top corner of the video with the top corner of the template to get the frame perfectly centered every time. A color correction profile was already set so all I had to do was import the screenshot, line up just the video frame, copy that into a 1440 x 1080 template, drag it to the bottom left corner and upscale it using the best setting I tested which was Sinc (lanczos3), then a quick brightness profile set, then the color correction profile. Once all that was done the images were exported and called image-000 to image-1800 since ffmpeg can make an image sequence out of images as long as they start with image-000. After all the frames were finished the sequence was made into a video with ffmpeg and then the black boxes along the side and interlacing lines on the top and bottom were cropped out and the video set back to 1440 x 1080 with AviSynth. After this a test upload was done and it was determined that the video being 25fps caused YouTube to compress it much more than usual, so the video was made back into a sequence of images and then each frame was doubled and all the files batch renamed from image-000 to image-3599. So the final video ended up being presented the same way the DVD would have if there were no interlacing issues, and thanks to ffmpegs compression methods the file size was not bigger than the 25fps version. The audio was next and for the longest time I was using the audio from the DVD file that I attempted to fix the eqalisation on and do some noise reduction due to hiss being very present. However in the last few days a higher quality version came to light when I was digging through the extracted RF files in the ART0001 folder, there were many audio tracks of superior quality found and in one of the folders appropriately named "intro" there was a file called "legointro" so I played it and amazingly it turns out to be the same audio used in the 320 x 240 intro but not cut down to a bit depth of 8, instead it was the almost original file being 22,050Hz PCM 16 bit audio. So hidden in the files the whole time was the exact file I needed for my restored video, using the same technique as they did with the DVD audio I mirrored the frequencies from 0Hz to 11,025Hz up past the previous quality peak and made the track 44,100Hz. After this much more work was done to the equaisation and I also separated the central, left and right channels and increased the outer channel amplification to give the whole track a more spacious sound, the frequencies above 16,000Hz were then deleted as the data present from here up caused very high frequency noise that did not work well with the lower frequencies. Due to the duplicated frames the audio did have to be sped up by 0.75 percent so if it sounds a bit pitched up that is why, also there is a section towards the end after Brad and Baron jump the ice ramp that the video is still for just under a second, this is because in the next scene there are missing frames for some reason so duplicate frames had to be added to keep the audio in time with the video. Here you can see the file after the frequency mirror was performed, the frequencies above 11,025Hz are duplicated from below and does increase the quality of the track if equalised properly. So here it is all done! A huge thank you to Mr. Skeltal for helping me with using ffmpeg, AviSynth and a few other programs which would not have made the restoration possible. Also a big thank you to Cyrem for his RF extraction tool which enabled me to find the higher quality intro music. Here is the full quality version which came out to a decent 135 MB, uncompressed video at 15,000 kbps and full quality PCM 44,100Hz restored audio.

So it was my birthday and I had a very nice time with family and friends. Loot included: - clothes and blanket - two DLCs for Warhammer 2 Total War which I have spent the past week playing with -One 'black box' from a friend that contains OSes from the 80's, which in turn can then run various games from that time period, including the first three text-based ZORK adventures aaarg my enter key isn't working- and such a quantity of Lego that I couldn't build it all over the weekend! ATLANTIS: - 8075 Neptune Carrier (of which I had one already ) - large set - 8077 Exploration HQ (of which I also had one already ) - very large set - 8059 Seabed Scavenger - small set - 8060 Typhoon Turbo Sub - medium set - 8057 Wreck Raider - small fry compared to the above All complete, which is nice! Minifigures, portal keys, and all! FANTASY CASTLE THAT'S LITERALLY WARHAMMER (evil skeletons, Orcs with green skin, Dwarves, heroic Mannish defenders) - 7079 Drawbridge Defense (missing some minifigure accessories; one crossbow, some weapons (got plenty spare ), golden shield (used serving dish instead), golden sword (used katana instead), golden helmet (used gold fire cap instead... this guy looks pretty wacko now ) - large set - 7037 Tower Raid (complete and duplicate, neither of which worry me ) - medium set - 7097 Troll's Mountain Fortress (missing 1/2 of minifigure heads but all bricks, and both trolls, there) - very large set Note on 7097 - It is the worst fortress I've ever seen. It has no reinforcing at all, and when assembling it the pressure of putting bricks together caused the high tower to just disintegrate before my hands. Using my remote controlled repeating ballista, I ran the combined fortress over into pulp. The gates fall off, the gate arch falls backwards, the bonds between segments split, the walls implode... A terribly reinforced set. I'll have to fix that MARS MISSION: - 7690 Eagle Command Base (missing one large orange pipe, which is a bit of a shame as it's one of the most important pieces of the set as well as one of the most irreplacable. Not a problem, I'll just share from my other Eagle Command Base ) - large set - 7692 Recon Dropship (missing minor replaceable pieces) - large set (The dropship is quite large, but the alien craft which will be forever termed "Alien Extractor" is quite hefty as well. Very dense. - 7697 Clawtank Ambush (complete) Now my third Clawtank (or is it fourth? I've started losing count of my number of Clawtanks and LRR's Loader Dozers ). However this can hardly be said to be a problem, unless one considers storage space. - medium set All in all, a colossal haul that I'm almost embarrassed to share ... But there's one more thing I got... Can you guess what it is? You'll never guess Make a guess, and then open the spoiler below... Yaaaaaaay! My engineering degree has taken its toll. See, it's not just the degree. As part of my engineering degree - that's what makes it so special - I have to have obtained 800 hours of engineering-related work experience. Else they don't let me graduate and I'm left floundering for work experience. At the beginning of last year I threw myself into it by skipping first year and starting second-year immediately. Then in the semester-to-semester break I picked up 120 hours of needed work experience. This left no time to prepare before heading into the next semester, where I took a fifth course on top of my workload. Then came the Christmas break, which was again spent a) desparately hunting for needed experience (very stressful!) and b) doing work experience. I finished work on a Wednesday and the first semester of 2018 started on the next Monday. All without a single proper 'day of rest.' (The engineering degree is four years, so I've got this year and one more to go). Small wonder, then, that my brain is now forcefully shutting me down as I'm on study leave. It is to be expected that I am feeling as exhausted and despondent as I do feel, just because my brain has never had time to calm down for the past one and a half years. Weekends would be spent fretting about assignments. Major holidays were spent hunting down work experience. Minor holidays always had assignments due over them. It's not too bad though. I'm very tired and unwilling to get any study done for exams, and my sleep schedule is nonexistent. But that's most of the effects of it (other effects include unwillingness to socialize and a total lack of patience with inanimate objects). Which is bearable, and as depression goes, relatively minor. At least, that's what I tell myself. Whether it's actually true is another matter, but at least I'd like to hope that things are minor. They certainly all make sense now that I know I have proper depression as opposed to random 'meh-ness;' nearly all of the hitherto inexplicable events that have happened this year can be explained now. Nearly. Oh well. I hope you're all doing better than I am, but I know for some of you that flat-out isn't the case. Al-ways look on, the bri-ight si-de of life!

I got those Klick magazines a while ago primarily for the Time Cruisers comics, but they've got some other cool story content in them as well. I'm not able to scan the full issues atm, but here're some okay-ish images of the story pages + translations. Aquazone Castle Pirates Space Some of the interesting stuff in these: - Aquanauts building on the ruins of Atlantis - The Dragon Knights and Royal Knights leaders change names between issues - King Lionheart to King Richard and Merlin to Mordred. Because this needed to be confusing as possible, the former ended with their UK name, the latter started with it. The change for the King is explained by making "Richard Lionheart" his full name, but the wizard just changes inexplicably. - The Dragon Knights are actually vanquished, a very rare conclusion to a conflict between factions. - I think this is the first place we've seen Woodhouse and Quextil/Kahuka interacting? Unless you count Racers - Aquanaut names: Uno, Tellus, and the leader Marlin. Unfortunately the names aren't attached to specific figs.

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