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CAPTURE.DOC
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1993-08-20
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CAPTURE IT! by Henrique Avila Vianna Version 2.1a 20/Aug/93
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
D O C U M E N T A T I O N F I L E
| New features and changes in this revision are indicated by a vertical bar
| at the left margin.
Introduction
------------
Can't you get that great picture of your favorite game? If your screen
grabber is not as powerful as you need, don't worry... Capture It! has arrived
to save you!
The ordinary screen capture utilities use the keyboard interrupt to copy
the screen when you press a hotkey. The problem is that the latest games
intercept INT 09 (the keyboard interrupt), what prevents the grabber from
receiving keyboard commands.
Capture It! has an exclusive timer system that captures the video memory
contents automatically every "x" seconds! You are still able to get the screen
manually, using the hotkey CTRL-ALT-C.
The program currently captures graphic screens of the following modes:
Hercules 720x348 monochrome
CGA 320x200 4 colors
CGA 640x200 2 colors
EGA/VGA 320x200 16 colors
EGA/VGA 640x350 16 colors
VGA 640x480 16 colors
VGA/MCGA 320x200 256 colors
How does it work?
-----------------
Capture It! is a TSR (Terminate-and-Stay-Resident) program. Once installed
it runs in background waiting for a request to get the screen (when you press
the hotkey or the specified time interval has been reached).
While resident, Capture It! uses about 9 kbytes of memory and it CAN be
loaded high, if you have an expanded memory manager and you need as much base
memory as possible.
The syntax is:
CAPTURE <path> [ <time> <number_of_screens> ]
<path> - The path where the captured screens are to be saved.
This item is required.
<time> - Time in seconds between each screen captured.
This item is optional. If not specified, the program will
capture the screen only when you press CTRL-ALT-C.
<number_of_screens> - Maximum number of screens that should be captured
by the program. Useful to avoid filling up your disk with
dozens of screens! If you use the <time> parameter, you must
specify the <number_of_screens>.
The maximum <number_of_screens> is 255.
Examples:
capture E:
captures the screen when the hotkey is pressed and save
the files in the current directory of drive E:
capture D:\GRAPHICS\PICTURES\ 10 20
captures the video contents every 10 seconds, or when the
hotkey is pressed. A maximum of 20 screens will be captured,
and the files will be saved in d:\graphics\pictures\
(DON'T FORGET THE LAST BACKSLASH!)
capture OR capture /?
will show you a brief help text.
The program will only capture the screen if the video mode at the moment
of the capture request is one of the valid modes (see above). Otherwise, the
request will be noted down and, as soon as the video mode is set properly, it
will be attended. When the screen is captured and saved successfully, the PC
speaker beeps twice.
The captured screens are saved in files named PICTxxx.CAP (where xxx is
a number from 1 to 255).
After capturing all the screens you want, press CTRL-ALT-R at the DOS
prompt to uninstall Capture It! from memory. If you want to change any
parameter (such as the time, or number of screens) you will also have to
uninstall the previous installed copy, and install it again with the new
parameters.
ATTENTION! When you install a new copy of Capture It!, it starts saving
the screens as PICT1.CAP. So, you must rename previous captured files to
prevent the program from rewriting them.
Now what?
---------
| The Capture It! files are saved in an uncompressed form, to speed up the
| capturing process, but these .CAP files are not a standard format. Well, at
| least the CGA captured screens can be BLOADed via BASIC. :) :)
|
| But..... thanks to Oliver Fromme you can now convert these .CAP files to
| the great (and well-known) GIF format.
| There are two ways to do it:
| - using directly the command-line driven CAP2GIF program (please
| refer to the CAP2GIF.DOC file for instructions);
| - or using SCReen LoaDer that lets you view and choose the pictures
| you want to convert to GIF (if you are capturing by time you'll propably get
| some undesired screens, so SCRLD lets you also delete files).
The SCRLD syntax is:
SCRLD [<path>] [/T<time>] [/F] [/L]
<path> - Path where to search for the .CAP files.
If not specified assumes the current path.
<time> - Time in seconds between each picture shown.
If not specified waits for a keypress to change file.
/F - If specified, uses fade effects between screens (VGA only).
/L - If specified, turns on loop. Use ESC to quit.
| While viewing a picture, the following command keys are available:
| G key - Calls the CAP2GIF program to save the picture as a .GIF file
| D key - Deletes the picture.
| Using the /T<time> option disables the above keyboard commands.
|
| PLEASE NOTE THAT CAP2GIF AND SCRLD PROGRAMS *MUST* BE IN THE SAME DIRECTORY
Examples:
scrld
displays all .CAP files in the current drive and directory
scrld F:\
displays all .CAP files in the root of drive F:
scrld D:\GRAPHICS\TEMP\ /T5 /F /L
displays all .CAP files in d:\graphics\temp\ with an interval
of 5 seconds between each one. Uses fade in and fade out effects,
and stays in loop until the ESC key is pressed.
scrld /?
shows a brief help text.
SCRLD can also read standard BASIC BSAVED screens (CGA only).
Known problems
--------------
As you know, MS-DOS isn't a multi-task environment. TSR applications run
in background, using hardware interrupts to have the processor's attention.
These applications are somewhat "intruders" in the system, and may not run
properly all the time.
After capturing a screen, Capture It! may cause the system to hang up, or
may confuse the screen display. In both cases, the first screen captured must
be ok, so you may need to quit the game and run it again to get more screens.
(Using a RAM drive to store the captured screens may be not a good idea if you
have to reset the system!).
If you are capturing manually, try not to use the hotkey during long disk
transfers, specially if you are running from floppies.
Only uninstall the program at the DOS prompt. If you use CTRL-ALT-R to
uninstall Capture It! while running another program it will abort and the
system may hang up or become unstable.
Remove unnecessary TSR programs while using Capture It!. Two or more TSR
applications may be incompatible with each other.
Some programs may access the video board in a non-standard way in some
video modes. Newer games access the VGA 256-color mode differently from the
MCGA, what causes most of screen capture utilities to read the video information
incorrectly. Version 2.1 of Capture It! corrects this problem. Anyway, if you
get a distorted image of the captured screen, try using another video
configuration in your program.
| A friend reported me problems using the Write Cache of SMARTDRV (the
| screens didn't get saved). I personally use only the Read Cache and it
| works fine.
|
| Attention EGA card owners:
| - Screens captured on EGA cards won't be correctly displayed by
| SCRLD on a VGA card; convert them to GIF to assure compatibility.
| - Screens captured on EG