Re: How to capture and convert a 80x25 text screen with colors to an image format?

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Marven Lee <marv...@gmail.com> writes:

[Cross-posting to news:comp.windows.x, while keeping
Followup-To:.]

[...]

> I'm not sure if other OSes support screen capture with the
> print-screen key.

For the systems using the X Window System for graphics, xwd(1)
should do the trick. (The resulting image should be readable by
GIMP, http://gimp.org/, ImageMagick, NetPBM, etc.)

Typically, there is no "system-wide" screen (or window) capture
key binding for such systems, but certain GUI environments
provide one anyway.

> Just did some googling and there is a DOS TSR that can take
> captures...

> http://pixelmetrics.com/Snarf/index.htm

The home page reads:

--cut: http://pixelmetrics.com/Snarf/ --
Snarf captures full-screen DOS graphics, [...]
--cut: http://pixelmetrics.com/Snarf/ --

I haven't tried it myself, but I'm not that sure that it is
capable of capturing /text mode/ screens, which is (AIUI) what
the OP has requested.

IIRC, the VGA (EGA) text modes (including mode 3 = 80 x 25) are
memory-mapped to 0xB8000 (= B800:0000.) Once the respective
memory area (which is 80 x 25 x 2 = 4000 bytes long) is dumped
to a file, one can drop the attribute bytes and use pbmtext(1)
[1] to convert it to an image.

Alas, pbmtext(1) is strictly monochrome. (Perhaps there should
be ppmtextega(1) and pgmtextmda(1) just as well.)

For the font, Terminus [2] would be my choice. (Unless the DOS
software in question alters the video adapter's font to contain
any application-specific characters, that is.)

[1] http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmtext.html
[2] http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/

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