What are the best portable screen capture programs for capturing screenshots from fullscreen games (for games which don't have their own screen capture capability)?
I would normally use Irfan View to do incidental screen captures but I haven't tried it for repeated full-screen captures.
Thoughts; anybody?
Capturing screenshots from games
I use FGWndGrab for all my capture needs, as it is extremely small and efficient, although some games can't really be captured due to the way they're rendered. For a good example of how this works, start playing a windowed mode video in a media player that supports full overlay (VideoLAN does it this way by default, Media Player Classic can easily be configured to do so - go to the output section and select Overlay Mixer as output method, then restart) and take a screen capture, then open that capture up. If you've already stopped the video, the area where the video is in the picture will be black, but if you're still playing the video and the screen capture is overlapping it, that section of the video will be played within the screen capture.
This is because that area of the screen is basically pointing directly to your graphics card's RAM, which cannot be captured very easily at all. Kinda nifty to see, infuriating if you want a direct capture
Long story short, for those games that don't have direct screenshot ability, you MIGHT not be able to capture their contents at all, but if you can then an application like FGWndGrab will do nicely.
This is because that area of the screen is basically pointing directly to your graphics card's RAM, which cannot be captured very easily at all. Kinda nifty to see, infuriating if you want a direct capture
Long story short, for those games that don't have direct screenshot ability, you MIGHT not be able to capture their contents at all, but if you can then an application like FGWndGrab will do nicely.Now showing: Taksi! Basically, if you can't get the screen captures through other means, try using Taksi. It's very good at hooking OpenGL and DirectX games and enabling direct screenshots from them. Make sure you grab the stable version though, the recent test version wreaked havoc on my computer (required a restart just to allow windows to function).