GBA DS cover project

From CAGwiki

1 Overview
2 Current status
3 Instructions
4 Appearances in the media
5 CAG links
6 External links

Overview

In November of 2004, CAG member organicow posted a thread in the DS/GBA forum describing an idea he had for displaying GBA games on shelves with the rest of his games, using the then newly-released DS cases:

When I got my DS and Mario 64 DS, I was struck by how cool-looking (though not very portable) the mini-DVD-style cases are. I've always wanted a way to store my GBA games on my gameshelf in a manner similar to my PS/PS2/DC/XB/GC games. So, since all DS cases have a GBA cart slot in them as well, I decided to start a little project.

Organicow took some measurements of the DS covers that were inside the case and used the measurements to create covers for GBA games that, when printed, would fit the DS cases. With the help of other CAG users scanning boxes and creating covers, the project grew at a rapid pace. CAG member Snowcone was particularly instrumental not only in creating covers, but also in hosting all of the images at his site, Snackbar Games.

With the popularity of the GBA DS Cover project, other cover and case projects began to spring up on the CAG forums. Snackbar Games continued to provide hosting, giving the other projects a place to store their created covers. For more information about the other cover projects, see Category:Projects.

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Current status

As of August 04, 2006, there are 592 GBA DS case covers available. The project has also expanded to include covers for DS, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance Video, Genesis, SNES, N64, PS1, PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, Saturn, and Dreamcast.

Update (Sept. 12, 2006): The GBA DS Cover Project is getting a new home at http://www.thecoverproject.net

Update (April 23, 2007): We now support the following categories and platforms. Each category is listed with the current number of available game covers:

Dreamcast - 179
Gameboy - 94
Gameboy Advance - 647
Gameboy Advance Video - 8
Gameboy Color - 92
GameCube - 264
Genesis - 145
Intellivision - 5
Mac - 2
MS-DOS - 2
NES - 19
Nintendo 64 - 536
Nintendo DS - 90
Nintendo Wii - 88
Playstation 1 - 257
Playstation 2 - 482
Playstation 3 - 16
Playstation Portable - 22
Sega 32X - 4
Sega CD - 2
Sega Master System - 2
Sega Saturn - 48
Super Nintendo - 148
Windows - 84
Xbox - 152
Xbox 360 - 194

Update (Oct. 19, 2007): We now have over 5,800 covers for over 4,000 different games.

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Instructions

Scan in the front, back, and side of your GBA box into 3 different images at 300dpi or higher.
Trim off the edges of the each of the scanned images. This is to remove any worn edges of the box.
Resize the front and back of the boxes to 1535x1370 (The action file will do this for you).
Clean the side image up to be used for the spine of the cover.
Resize the spine to 190x1370 (The action file will do this for you) and paste the GBA Spine Logo into the image and align it to the very top. Shift your spine image (game logo) around until it looks good. This is a subjective thing and takes a little tweaking.
Create an image that is 3260x1370 and copy and paste the previous 3 images into it and align them end to end. Save it with a quality of 10 and you are done.
Create a thumbnail if you are inclined to do so using the PS action file. Thumbnails are in the format gamename_thumb.jpg (only use lowercase).

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