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Point camcorder at monitor to make movie of gameplay?

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First post, by retro games 100

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Anyone tried this? I was thinking of buying a camcorder, then pointing it at the monitor, and playing a game from start to finish. Say this takes 10 hours. I would then (somehow?) trim this 10 hours down to about 1 hour. I'd have something like 30 lots of 2 minute "movie snapshots", scattered from over the 10 hour period. I think it would make an interesting "record" of playing a game.

But can you get a camcorder to focus on a monitor at quite close range?

Reply 3 of 9, by Harekiet

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Dunno if you'll find pci cards that have tv-out but there were enough agp cards with composite/s-video outputs. If you have some s-video/composite capture capability on some other pc then you could just record on that.

Reply 5 of 9, by akula65

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If you are going to make it available to the public, this is the kind of thing you are "competing" against:

http://www.archive.org/details/lets-play

Note that the different formats for a particular game are not necessarily all at the same resolution or quality.

Reply 6 of 9, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

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retro games 100 wrote:

Can you "record tv-out" on ancient 486 PCs?

Probably with these.

Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.

Reply 7 of 9, by 5u3

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What about the video recording function of DOSBox?
For Windows games you could use Fraps or something similar.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:
retro games 100 wrote:

Can you "record tv-out" on ancient 486 PCs?

Probably with these.

The <10$ cable adapters won't work, since they rely on the video card driver to sync to the correct signal, but those >30$ converter boxes actually might be useful for something. However, expect difficulties if you want to record pre-VGA or tweaked VGA modes.

Reply 9 of 9, by Kelly Stiver

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retro games 100 wrote:

Really? Let me tell you about some of my other ideas... 🤣

Retro, I had an idea that was similar to yours - I brought a 4 megapixel digital camera when I still had my old Packard-Bell computer (runs DOS/Windows 3.xx), and I played Stonekeep (an old DOS game by Interplay) on this computer, and I kept aiming my camera at the monitor (didn't even know about its' close-up feature then) and I kept snapping pictures as I played the game from start to finish. It took me maybe about several months to record the whole game as jpeg snapshots, but I did it. Plus, the great majority of the images were sharp and crisp, with a few occasional blurry ones when the camera wouldn't focus on the graphics display on the monitor.

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