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Recording Video

Ben's picture
Wed, 08/21/2013 - 11:47 — Ben

Hi all,

I'm Ben and I'm a freelance designer. I've mostly worked for Dan Marshall's Size Five Games, specifically on Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please!

As Dan and I have mentioned in a few interviews, we started designing games as teenagers on KnP and GF. People have shown interest in seeing these old, terrible games of ours, so I dug out the floppies. One of them was a one-disk game and easy to sort out (free download here: http://www.sizefivegames.com/forum/index.php?topic=4182.0).

I'm trying to record some videos of a couple of Games Factory games. They work fine in Windows 7, but Fraps just won't record them. Before I start trying out CamStudio and other (free) alternatives, is this a known issue that has a workaround? I've tried a couple of different frame rates in Fraps' settings to no avail.

Thanks!

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Wed, 08/21/2013 - 13:54 — Johny L.
Johny L.'s picture

Welcome to Glorious

Welcome to Glorious Trainwrecks.

I have bandicam which doesn't lag like Fraps and lets you record safely for all Clickteam-made games.

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Both 3 characters shown on my avatar are copyright Black Squirrel, Jonny Smeby and Nintendo.

Wed, 08/21/2013 - 18:11 — Blueberry Soft
Blueberry Soft's picture

Are you running them

Are you running them fullscreen or windowed? I haven't used fraps, but when I've tried recording 3D Rad things in fullscreen it doesn't work, but if I run them windowed it works fine. Maybe that's helpfull.

Thu, 08/22/2013 - 03:45 — sergiocornaga
sergiocornaga's picture

Basically, if Fraps won't

Basically, if Fraps won't show the FPS counter in the corner of the screen when playing the game, it can't record it and you'll have to move onto something else. Sorry man! There may be some method for tricking Fraps I'm unaware of, but I wouldn't count on it.

Thu, 08/22/2013 - 04:14 — Ben
Ben's picture

Ok, thanks guys. I couldn't

Ok, thanks guys. I couldn't get it going windowed, but I guess that probably wouldn't help with Fraps anyway. My other option before trying other capture software is to see if I can install them through DosBox on Win 3.11 and then use the DosBox capture function...

Sat, 03/29/2014 - 07:54 — Ben
Ben's picture

Recording KnP games in Win3.1 with DOSBox

Hello again everyone,

I ended up recording those GF games with Bandicam then cropping the watermark out with VirtualDub then converting to mp4 to get the size down with Handbrake. (Note: this is just for a personal project, so I feel morally comfortable with cropping the watermark out. I've put all these programs on my donate-to-when-have-more-money list!)

Unfortunately, I just looked back over my previous recordings that I made of KnP games running in Win 3.11 on DOSBox, using the in-built DOSBox video recorder, and playing them in VLC they're all visually glitchy to some degree. Occasionally the entire screen is taken over by multicolour noise. Meanwhile, playing them in Windows Media Player has no glitches but they seem to jump forward every now and again, as if a second or so had been cut out. I'm probably going to edit in Windows MovieMaker (on a different computer, so I may need to install the DOSBox video codec...), so I'll see how the videos act once I've plugged them into that, but I'm interested to know: is this a known and/or easily-solvable problem?

Thanks all!

Sat, 03/29/2014 - 20:59 — Blueberry Soft
Blueberry Soft's picture

Not sure. It sounds like the

Not sure. It sounds like the videos are missing data, but it's not like you downloaded them :/ I've never used DOSboxes recorder, so don't know if it has any quirks in its file output. Are the files really large; i could be related to how the software is caching the video, but that's a guess.

I'd try playing back in Media Player Classic if you can, as it output nicer video than VLC.

My only suggestion would be what you're already planning: to try rerendering the video in another program.

Sun, 03/30/2014 - 07:29 — Ben
Ben's picture

Handbrake

Thanks! The files only played audio in Movie Maker, but that was on a different computer which also had the same issue in VLC, which had played them, albeit glitchily, on my laptop. I could perhaps find the right codec and download it (following howtogeek.com/118032/beginner-how-to-find-what-codecs-you-need-to-play-any-media-file), but I also realised that converting from avi to mp4 in Handbrake gets them to play everywhere, so I'm just going to do that.

This is a bit of a non-topic, but hopefully it'll at least offer suggestions to anyone having similar troubles - most stuff I found on the internet was more geared towards capturing footage of TIE Fighter rather than KnP games, which seem to have different issues.

Sat, 02/28/2015 - 21:53 — x

Well

I'm assuming fraps uses directx for recording and all that. If you're able to convert the game to flash you could record it that way, like either via a media player that plays flash, or a browser like seamonkey and just use handbrake to crop the unneeded window space. You could also try Magic Camera, I think they did a pretty good job with that software and can add a camera PIP with it or some silly flash animations to append it. I'm sure the unregistered version has an unregistered thing with it, but yeah. It was a very useful giveaway at the time and they're nice people over there.