Tyan23

I am documenting video game and home computer history with screenshots. My current goal is to create a 4-8 screen screenshot section for every video game console and home computer that I can emulate. For those with many/important games or programs, I also create galleries.

Screenshots of emulated video games: Tips&Tricks

Game-Content Tips

Always show game play! Never show the title, that's useless
Try to give a typical and representative impression of the game. In general, the first level is better than the last one.
Do not show characters in unusual animation frames, otherwise they are hard to recognize. For instance, show Pac-Man with the mouth open and not as a yellow circle. Avoid overlapping sprites for the same reason.
Try to show several elements of the game on the same screenshot (but not too many). For instance, this screenshot shows two enemy types and one of them in two states; this screenshot shows a second vehicle as well as a curve
Be careful that characters can be hard to spot in a picture without movement. Try to move the main character in front of background with good contrast, and wait for opponents to do the same. Game Boy Color games are the worst in terms of contrast; in this pic Donkey Kong is hard to recognize: DKC screenshot
Make many screenshots and chose the best one. In fast-paced games I usually do at least 10, sometimes up to 100, to find the right one

Technical Tips

if possible, use the emulator's screenshot function. If not, make sure that the game is displayed in a window at the original resolution and use a regular screenshot tool. Never capture in fullscreen or other scaled modes with a screenshot tool
Unless you have a high-res (512*200 or higher) game with photo-realistic or 3D graphics, always save as PNG and never as JPEG. JPEG compression ruins artificial-looking / hand-drawn graphics, often produces bad artifacts, and is usually even bigger than a PNG image. Example: Raiden PNG screenshot (17kb) and Raiden JPEG screenshot (38kb).
If you have such a high-res 3D game and you want to save it as JPEG (like this Nintendo 64 screenshot), you need a very high quality setting to avoid artifacts, because of the sharp contrasts of computer graphics. Most of my N64 screenshots use 0.95 (out of 1). This compresses them down to 100 kByte, instead of 300kByte PNGs.
Some games, especially on the Playstation, may use unusual resolutions such as 512x256. Grab them at this resolution and scale them up to the nearest 3:2 resolution (512x340 in this case). After doing this, efficient PNG compression is not possible anymore and you need to use JPEG
PNGs produced by regular programs do not have an optimal compression rate, you can often half the images in size with the right compressor. A good tool is Advance Mame's advpng from the AdvanceCOMP suite. Use with "-z -4" parameters for maximum compression, but be sure to backup your images first! It modifies the existing files, and it has some bugs and ruined a few pictures. (The author recommends to use it only with MAME-generated pictures, but it usually works with other PNGs as well). You can find it here: http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/comp-readme.html
It's impossible to do real screenshots of some games, especially on the Atari 2600: because of hardware limitations it can not show as many sprites as some games need, so it shows them alternating. The user sees the sprites flickering, but if you capture the screen, you won't see them at all. A classic example is the Atari 2600 Pac-Man screenshot. Only one of the 4 ghosts is visible at a time. The only real solution is to fake those pictures: make several screen shots and merge them with some image manipulation program (Photoshop, Paintshop, Gimp etc). I did this with the A2600 Asteroids screenshot and a few other. I kept Pac-Man as is, because the Pac-Man article explains the problem of the game.

Screenshots of emulated (non-gaming) software: Tips&Tricks

Content-related tips

try to show a significant part of the program, but not too many unneccessary details. For instance, don't show the content of a pull-down menu (unless you want to demonstrate a specific function)
try to show the application with data that demonstrates its capabilities. For instance, this screenshot of a word processor shows the different styles and fonts.

Technical Tips

use the emulator's screenshot function. if this is not possible, display the emulator screen in a window in the emulator's original resolution (don't scale it up) and use a regular screenshot tool
always use PNG, never jpeg
in order to reduce the size of the image, try to convert the image to a indexed/palette color mode with a painting program (if possible). Use a recompressor tool like described in the game section

Game Screenshot Section / Gallery Selection Criteria

The first problem when doing a new screenshot gallery section is selecting the games:

Obviously, the best-selling and best-rated games should be included
I try to get a selection that spreads over the systems lifetime, beginning with first games and release titles (even if they are bad) and ending with the last
Even if the console's manufacturer did the most important games, I always try to include a few third-party manufacturer games
The screenshots should contain a variety of genres. E.g. i always try to include as least one sport game in the 8-screenshot-section, even if is is not as important as the other games
Dont ignore cheesy movie- or toy-games, like Atari 2600's E.T. or ColecoVision's "Masters of the Universe" in the gallery. Yes, they are bad, but they are a part of video game culture and history
The available games are often limited, because I cant get ROMs for some games (e.g. Mario and Zelda games are hard to find - Nintendo protects them) or because they can't be emulated (almost every console lacks a screenshot of an important game because of emulation problems)

Finished consoles and computers

To-Do

better table layout for galleries that does not break with long titles
Vectrex screenshots
There are some other systems, like PC Engine. Dreamcast, Sega Saturn, 3DO and PS2, but I cant emulate them..

Licensing

I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

Multi-licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License versions 1.0 and 2.0
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under Wikipedia's copyright terms and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0 and version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.

Gallery articles up for deletion!

I noticed that these articles:

that you worked on in the past are now are up for deletion. Would you vote in favor of keeping these articles? They show the history of the advancement of video game graphics over time and are useful as a source of images for graphics for video game articles. --ShaunMacPherson 19:58, 23 September 2005 (UTC)