[Air-l] Taking stills from video games

Alex Halavais halavais at gmail.com
Sun Dec 5 09:28:18 PST 2004


To follow on Elijah's suggestion of actually shooting the screen,
these may be of help:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000818190841/http://www.agfaphoto.com/library/digicourse/200004/screenshot.html
http://www.southgatearc.org/atv/tvphotos.htm

I recall contructing out of cardboard a camera mount for my monitor,
c. 1986, based on an article in (I think) Creative Computing. Seems a
bit silly now, but certainly doable, and may end up taking up less
time than finding a working software solution.

Depending on the game, you should definitely check out FRAPS:
http://www.fraps.com/,  which will work with many OpenGL-based games,
but chokes on some of the newest (e.g., Halo2, aparently). You'll need
the resources on your system for the added overhead.

Finally, if you are looking for video or are OK with a reduction of
image quality, you could always use a cheap tv-out card to dump it to
a VCR or another computer. There are also specialized digital RGB
recorders, but these are *really* not cheap.

FWIW,

Alex





On Sun, 5 Dec 2004 10:28:47 -0600 (CST), elijah wright <elw at stderr.org> wrote:
> 
> > what version OS do you have? I have OS X and there a program called Grab
> > in Utilities that can work for this - screen capture is the way to go, I
> > would think.
> 
> unfortunately this tends not to work with full-screen games that use
> DirectX or OpenGl - the OS doesn't really 'know' what's in the screen
> buffer, so captures are hard to do.
> 
> a lot of the high-end games (half-life, quake1/2/3, Doom3, etc) have some
> facility built into them for making "movies" of a session.  for some of
> them, that may be the only way to get captures without placing a physical
> camera in front of your display....
> 
> elijah
> 
> 
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-- 
//
// Alexander Halavais
// Graduate Director of Informatics
// University at Buffalo School of Informatics
// contact info: http://alex.halavais.net
//



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