How to capture game footage?

Dabura · Post by **Dabura** » Wed Apr 16, 2003 5:06 pm

I'm looking for a way to capture footage of a video game (not pre-rendered stuff, but the actual playing enviroment).

There is nothing in the game that would allow me to record a demo or anything like that. I would like to know if there is any way to capture it without recording the footage to a VCR and then back to the computer.

Jason 00 · Post by **Jason 00** » Wed Apr 16, 2003 9:16 pm

This may or may not be helpful to you. There is an emulation program called NesterJ which allows you to play older NES games and such on your PC. That is assuming you are using a PC and not a MAC. Anyway, it can capture game footage as you play. But my experience with it found that it was not very Hard Drive friendly (aka "Large File Size").The program plays Game ROM's which can be downloaded from several different sites. However, legally you are supposed to own the game itself before you download a copy of it's ROM in a handy zip file. But hey, I bought The Legend of Zelda at one time or another. Also the program does like to crash when tring to capture on an XP machine but only after you attempt to complete the capture. Basicly it creates the AVI file and then crashes, so you still get your footage. NHMK's web site has a short tutorial on this program.

Dabura · Post by **Dabura** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 12:33 pm

Um, thanks for the tip, but I'm not trying to capture an NES game. I need something to directly capture everything I'm doing, which includes switching between multiple programs. So far my only solution I can think of is using TV-out to another computer's TV-in, but I'd rather keep it on one machine.

Ecks · Post by **Ecks** » Sat Apr 26, 2003 11:10 am

Are you talking about a console game? Or a computer game? It sounds like your talking about a computer game to me..

If you don't already have if thats a case, your going to need a video capture card of some type, and most likely another computer.

The vid cap card is necessary, but the other computer isn't. You could just record the footage onto a vcr (assuming you have suitable TV-Out's) but you don't want to do that right?

I don't think its feasible, unless you just have this demon of a PC... just the thought of trying to use your system's resources to play a game AND capture video footage at the same time without losing frames (among other problems) doesn't seem feasible. Now if all you wanted was footage that can usually be extracted by other means from most PC games, but otherwise I can't think of anything to help ya