And it's not a problem with the core I was using, because I tried it with two different cores. I told it to size the window to native NES resolution, and it gave me these monstrosities instead. I don't know why the fuck RetroArch did this. This is a pain in the ass, not just because it interrupts the flow of the game but because it's fucking difficult to set up a good screenshot in a tiny 160x144 window on a 1080p TV when you're sitting on the couch across the room.Īnd that's before you get into weird shit like this: So, instead of that, what I did was turn off the filters and, when I was ready to take a screenshot, toggle fullscreen off to take it. Which isn't really ideal it doesn't make a lot of sense for the Game Boy screenshots to be the same size as the PSP ones, and 892px is just too damn big to get multiple images onscreen and get a good comparison anyway. I could set up a script to scale them automatically, but we'd still end up with a bunch of images all scaled to the same width. I could resize the images manually, but that would be more work for me. I could set my emulators to output as JPEG instead of PNG, but that would result in a visible decrease in quality. Now, there are things I could do differently. If you're reading this on a 3G connection, then I probably owe you an apology. Unnecessarily big you just loaded a 1920px-wide image just to display a scaled-down 892px version. That's 892px wide (unless you're viewing it on a mobile device, in which case it's less), whereas the images are between 11px wide.Īnd they're PNG's, which means they're also pretty big in terms of filesize (except the Mega Man Xtreme one). In fact, unless you've zoomed this page in, you're not even looking at them at full size right now, because they've been scaled to fit the content area of this post. Now, first of all, those images are pretty big. Here are some of the screenshots I used in the last three posts:Īnd here are what those games look like when I play the game scaled up for a 1080p screen and with a graphics filter turned on: The next decision I made that made my life more difficult was to try and grab all the images at each device's native resolution, with graphical filters turned off. But I think that would have taken just as long as getting the damn things myself. So I could have poked around the Internet trying to find the screens I was looking for, either as static images on websites or as caps from Let's Play videos on YouTube. I think this was probably the right call VG Museum has a perfectly good shot of the floating platforms in Ice Man's stage that I could have used, but it doesn't really have any other grabs of the Mega Man screens I needed, and it's got next to nothing from Mega Man X and nothing at all from the other three games I was capping. I opted to grab all the screenshots myself, rather than try and find a resource that already had them (or close enough). Some of it may be down to the tools I'm using, or just my lack of proficiency with them. I like how the whole thing turned out, but it took hours and hours to put together, and playing a game to farm for screenshots is a pretty different and altogether less fun experience than playing it just to play it. More specifically, work I don't get paid for. The other day on Brontoforumus, I described it as taking two things I enjoy doing - playing video games and talking about video games - and turning them into work. It wound up taking a lot longer to get those posts done and posted than planned, and it really wasn't a whole lot of fun. It took a long time to get them all, for a number of reasons I'll get into in a moment. So the last three posts comparing and contrasting five different Mega Man games required rather a lot of screenshots. Or, Why I Won't Be Doing That Again Any Time Soon: A Postmortem Tag: NES Actually, It's About How Games Journalism is a Pain in the AssĬategories: Games, Stream of Consciousness, Tech
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