screen capture of old dos graphics

November 17, 2005 9:14 PM

I'm trying to get a of an old based program but i can't use printscreen (keyboard), snagit, and the window sizes to fullscreen. Any suggestions better then taking a photo of the (i'm sick of putting reflections of my head in reports). More inside...

The program is one of those super useful government programs that was written 15 years ago when nibbles was king. I'm able to run it from the command line of windows and can take a shot of the text input, but the program creates some graphical images which force the to fullscreen and doesn't allow me to use printscreen ( to the clipboard) or snagit (with shortcut keys). Help me obi wan kenobi, you're my only hope...

posted by NGnerd to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Response by poster: weird, every time i was supposed to say "screen" it was removed from the text above....man, no respect!
posted by NGnerd at 9:15 PM on November 17, 2005

Try using an emulator like dosbox or whatever
posted by aubilenon at 9:58 PM on November 17, 2005

I found this article which suggests selecting the "Also capture all clipboard text including DOS full screens." in menu File/Preferences.

This microsoft document explains printing a 16-bit application (from your printer) with printscreen. I think by 16-bit they mean applications that take control over the system directly, which yours most likely does.
posted by sophist at 11:48 PM on November 17, 2005

Run your DOS command followed by direction to print it ot a file instead of the screen. Usually, the ">" sign plus a file name you choose will work:

abcde > stuff.txt

Then you can load it with a windows program -- Word or even Notepad.

If that doesn't work, you could try the "|" (Pipe) command to send the output to the printer:

abcde | LPT(1)

or something like that. I haven't used DOS in so long that I've forgotten the syntax.

Finally, when Windows arrived, but lots of people were still using DOS, I remember a bunch of clipboard utilities for DOS, which should still be around on the DOS boards.

Good luck.
posted by KRS at 12:42 PM on November 18, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks guys, so far nothing has worked. we're looking into using a second computer to vnc into the first and run the program...never thought it would be so difficult to get a screenshot
posted by NGnerd at 12:56 PM on November 18, 2005

digital camera?
posted by mediaddict at 4:26 PM on November 18, 2005

KRS, piping the output of a program is nowhere close to taking a screenshot. Graphical applications don't even *have* stdout.

Run it under VMware.
posted by Rhomboid at 9:38 PM on November 18, 2005