Recording AVI of PPC screen

[sponge]

[Jinks]

[sponge]

The problem is I don't have access to source, or PC versions 95% of the time, I need a way to load any app, and start recording on the spot.

[rcp]

I would assume that most games would be using near 100% of the CPU and thus make it impossible to capture the output video and audio. We use our PPC emulator system (NOT the MS PPC emulator, mind you) to record video and audio. The PPC emulator system is a build of the PPC program that runs under DirectX and produces pixel perfect emulation of the PPC. It is, of course, capable of running many, many times faster than the PPC, so there is plenty of bandwidth to record audio and video. Obviously, this doesn't help you at all, but you probably *could* use a real PPC emulator to do much the same thing. The 'real PPC emulator' would be a window's program that emulator the hardware and the ARM CPU. I am sure there are programs that make an AVI from a desktop window, so you could, in theory, run the game using a real PPC emulator on the desktop. I don't, however, know if a true PPC emulator exists. Would be interesting to have....

Cheers,

rcp

[fzammetti]

One idea that someone smarter than me might want to think about is a hacked gx.dll...

At least in the cases where CloseDisplay() (or whatever the method is your supposed to call to flip the backbuffer forward, it's been a while since I've looked at GAPI) is called, you could write out that frame with a sequential filename and then combine them all together later on the desktop via some utility to create an AVI.

I know there are many cases where that method isn't called, so the idea may not be really worth much... that also assumes that writing out the file doesn't take enough CPU time to cut down frame rates, and I think there's probably some issues with write speeds that would make this maybe not work...

But it's one idea that might be worth a try if anyone has the time to put into it. The upside if it worked is that it would work for any program that used GAPI at some point, which is probably most games unless they are using PHAL I'd bet.

[Dan East]

Hmm. If you could hook GetTickCount and QueryPerformanceCounter to return whatever value you want, then you can make the game think it is running at whatever FPS you want to record in. Viola, perfect 30 FPS (or whatever target FPS you want) recordings.

Dan East

[HTK]

There are always the real world techniques, like taping it with a good video camera, just setup the brightness so the whites will not explode on the image.

Visual quality can be seen from the screenshots, the animation/sound and general in-game performance could be watched on the video

[Digby]

Yeah, I'm with HTK. I'd like to see it running realtime to see what the performance is like. Pointing a camera at the screen seems like the only way to do this correctly.

I wouldn't even mind if you post-processed the video to get a decent color balance afterward as long as the frame rate was indicative of what it is like to actually play the game.

[sponge]

[Dan East]

[sponge]

[Digby]

[Dan East]

[Kzinti]

[sponge]