lscapture

screen capture for LameStation

With this project, you can take screenshots of LameStation games! (epic!)

Included in this project is a test game that is already configured to take a screen capture (requires the LameStation SDK to build).

Installation

Download the git repository and run setup.py install (requires setuptools).

git clone https://github.com/lamestation/lscapture
cd lscapture
sudo python setup.py install

Add the path of the git repository to the PropellerIDE Spin path to make ScreenCapture accessible from any LameStation application.

Usage

Preparing an object

Include the ScreenCapture object and add a variable to store the address of the graphics buffer.

OBJ
    cap     : "ScreenCapture"
VAR
    word    buffer

Grab the buffer address during initialization.

PUB Main
    lcd.Start(buffer := gfx.Start)

Pass the address to the Capture method to take a picture.

    cap.Capture(buffer)

It's a good idea to find a way to control it, otherwise your application will run very slowly and dump more pictures than you need. I usually put it behind a button.

    if ctrl.A
        cap.Capture(buffer)}}

Capturing an image

The easiest way is to use the lscapture python tool. Here's how to use it.

Get a list of available ports with -l.

$ lscapture -l
/dev/ttyUSB0
/dev/ttyUSB1

Now run lscapture with the full port name to start the screen capture server.

$ lscapture /dev/ttyUSB0
Listening for capture input on port '/dev/ttyUSB0'...
Receiving image download!
Generating pic6.png...

lscapture will wait until it receives an image, then quit. You can also quit with Ctrl+C. It will generate PNG images with the name pic###.png, where ### is an incrementing number with leading zeroes, unless you use the -o option to specify the output file name.

You can display the image after download with -d. It'll look awesome like this!

The -s option will scale the resulting image to different sizes. The default is 4x.

lscapture /dev/ttyUSB0 -s 8

lscapture /dev/ttyUSB0 -s 1

For a full help, pass -h.

Creating a video

You may end up with a large number of images and want to make an awesome video of it. You can use ffmpeg to do so; here is a decent one-liner.

ffmpeg -r 30 -f image2 -s 1920x1080 -i pic%03d.png -vcodec libx264 -crf 25  -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

The only thing you may want to change is -r 30, which is the frame rate, depending on the speed of your game.

Remember that on LameStation:

• Unlimited: up to ~70Hz
• FULLSPEED: ~30Hz
• HALFSPEED: ~15Hz
• QUARTERSPEED: ~7Hz