Originally Posted by
Tanooki
I haven't tried an actual SNES box, they're kind of cheap and thin, not as bad as the garbage they used for N64. Mario Paint is a full on cardboard box. I know you really can't restore it, I don't have a magic cardboard repair machine nor the ink/process they had to put it to the box. I just went with glue in one spot and various inks to blend away the worst of it.
I don't think what you did for the TCP was a waste. One could argue I made a big time of wasting my time in the latter half of the 90s. Before people thought to scan manuals or make PDFs, people did text file conversions. I did some of the meatiest ones for the NES, the big one being Final Fantasy, all 80 pages of it and I recreated all of it page for page down to the texts under picture boxes. Faxanadu I did too, even made this pretty damn good looking ASCII world tree with all the names on that too spread over 2 pages. FF1 alone took much of a full weekend to put together. I did quite a few NES manuals and around a dozen for the old GB too. When people thanked me for them now and again that made it worth it, plus it was a good easy reference instead of putting more wear on the originals. Of course when I do have the assets and ability I will do something nicer, like the Faria Mail Away map uploaded here, both in PDF and very large JPG masters to help people who needed it and all to spite the NA members who mocked me when I asked for help getting a copy.