How did the magazine publishers capture such high quality screenshots?

[MkMoveList]

In the really old magazines, like from the 80s and very early 90s, its obvious they simply took pictures of the TV screens with a camera. But as you get to the mid to late 90s, the quality of the screenshots published in the magazines went up; gone are screenshots that have the bloom effect and tube curvature you get from taking a picture of a TV. The screenshot quality is on par with one taken from a modern game emulator or one of those hdmi screen recorder devices. You even have screenshots captured from when the game is clearly in motion but there is zero motion blur which you would get if you had to capture it by taking a picture of the TV. Also the gameboy screenshots definitely do not look like they just took a picture of the screen, they look like screen captures that could have been grabbed from a gameboy emulator running on a computer or something.

Did TV tuner capture devices for computers exist in the 90s? Is that how they were able to capture high quality screenshots?

[Areala]

54 minutes ago, MkMoveList said:

In the really old magazines, like from the 80s and very early 90s, its obvious they simply took pictures of the TV screens with a camera. But as you get to the mid to late 90s, the quality of the screenshots published in the magazines went up; gone are screenshots that have the bloom effect and tube curvature you get from taking a picture of a TV. The screenshot quality is on par with one taken from a modern game emulator or one of those hdmi screen recorder devices. You even have screenshots captured from when the game is clearly in motion but there is zero motion blur which you would get if you had to capture it by taking a picture of the TV. Also the gameboy screenshots definitely do not look like they just took a picture of the screen, they look like screen captures that could have been grabbed from a gameboy emulator running on a computer or something.

Did TV tuner capture devices for computers exist in the 90s? Is that how they were able to capture high quality screenshots?

I got this!

The major magazine publishers were often working with prototype or pre-release copies sent over by the game developers. In the cartridge days, there wouldn't be any plastic shell housing the games, they would be the printed circuit boards with the appropriate ROM chips soldered in place. You generally couldn't play these versions on a standard consumer console, so the magazines would have special versions of the hardware (like the dev kits of today) that would allow them to play these versions of the games. These were intended to be hooked up to a computer monitor rather than a television, so it was easy for the magazines to use a monitor attached to a computer running screen capture software, and grab whatever images they needed, then clean them up using Photoshop.

The dev kits for portable systems did not include screens, so they too would be hooked up to a monitor just like the standard consoles, which is how they got such clean screen grabs of the games without any of the screen blur or other graphical issues seen, for example, on the GameBoy.

*huggles*
Areala

[MkMoveList]

ok good to know! I figured it had to involve a computer doing a screen grab some how.

[BlitzFitness]

Nothing to really add other than saying what a great question and a great answer!

[TheRedEye]

On 11/14/2023 at 8:16 PM, Areala said:

I got this!

The major magazine publishers were often working with prototype or pre-release copies sent over by the game developers. In the cartridge days, there wouldn't be any plastic shell housing the games, they would be the printed circuit boards with the appropriate ROM chips soldered in place. You generally couldn't play these versions on a standard consumer console, so the magazines would have special versions of the hardware (like the dev kits of today) that would allow them to play these versions of the games. These were intended to be hooked up to a computer monitor rather than a television, so it was easy for the magazines to use a monitor attached to a computer running screen capture software, and grab whatever images they needed, then clean them up using Photoshop.

The dev kits for portable systems did not include screens, so they too would be hooked up to a monitor just like the standard consoles, which is how they got such clean screen grabs of the games without any of the screen blur or other graphical issues seen, for example, on the GameBoy.

*huggles*
Areala

Hey! Sorry but I'm going to have to correct you here, what you're describing didn't start until the original Xbox.

First of all, EPROM PCBs work fine in retail systems, and there's just no such thing as a special review system for cartridge-based games (other than the capture units for portable systems that you described). CD-based systems (post-Sega CD) had copy protection, and so there were special debug units to play burned discs, but nothing about them did any video capture. As you mentioned, portable systems had special units for capture, but until the DS these special units just spit out standard television video.

How editors captured screens depends on the publication, year, and environment. Nintendo Power took photos of a CRT in a dark room until about issue 20, when they switched to a video printer, before finally settling into using a video capture card on a computer (I'm not sure when this switch occurred, since video printer stuff looks so similar to digital capture). They almost always captured in pure RGB, and had modified NES units to do this. EGM also took photos at first, and is famous for its photos at trade shows, but for in-office capture they switched to capture cards on Macintosh somewhere around issue 9 (and like Nintendo, they modified their systems for RGB video to get the best quality). They also would sometimes record gameplay onto video tape and capture the frames they wanted afterward.

If you want to go back further than Nintendo Power, most of the early 80s stuff was using publisher-provided screenshots, most of which were actually hand-drawn and not actually capture of a game. Computer magazines took photos, either directly or with a really neat device called a "film recorder," which was basically a tiny CRT inside of a box with a 35mm camera attached. I don't think video game magazines used these, but I think some PR/marketing/back-of-the-box shots did.

The switch to digital capture came at around the same time that magazines switched from paste-up layout to digital. Pretty much every video game magazine was using video capture cards and doing all-digital layouts in QuarkExpress by 1993 or 1994, give or take, and did so until the systems did their own internal capture. At least some (and maybe most/all) of them usually had a foot pedal so they could easily capture screens while playing, instead of having to reach over and hit something on the keyboard.

The first system to have any kind of frame buffer capture, as I mentioned, was the original Xbox debug kits. You had to network it in to a computer and hit a capture key there. It became standard in the 360/ps3 era, just as it became standard for users.

[Areala]

On 11/17/2023 at 7:34 PM, TheRedEye said:

Hey! Sorry but I'm going to have to correct you here, what you're describing didn't start until the original Xbox.

First of all, EPROM PCBs work fine in retail systems, and there's just no such thing as a special review system for cartridge-based games (other than the capture units for portable systems that you described). CD-based systems (post-Sega CD) had copy protection, and so there were special debug units to play burned discs, but nothing about them did any video capture. As you mentioned, portable systems had special units for capture, but until the DS these special units just spit out standard television video.

How editors captured screens depends on the publication, year, and environment. Nintendo Power took photos of a CRT in a dark room until about issue 20, when they switched to a video printer, before finally settling into using a video capture card on a computer (I'm not sure when this switch occurred, since video printer stuff looks so similar to digital capture). They almost always captured in pure RGB, and had modified NES units to do this. EGM also took photos at first, and is famous for its photos at trade shows, but for in-office capture they switched to capture cards on Macintosh somewhere around issue 9 (and like Nintendo, they modified their systems for RGB video to get the best quality). They also would sometimes record gameplay onto video tape and capture the frames they wanted afterward.

If you want to go back further than Nintendo Power, most of the early 80s stuff was using publisher-provided screenshots, most of which were actually hand-drawn and not actually capture of a game. Computer magazines took photos, either directly or with a really neat device called a "film recorder," which was basically a tiny CRT inside of a box with a 35mm camera attached. I don't think video game magazines used these, but I think some PR/marketing/back-of-the-box shots did.

The switch to digital capture came at around the same time that magazines switched from paste-up layout to digital. Pretty much every video game magazine was using video capture cards and doing all-digital layouts in QuarkExpress by 1993 or 1994, give or take, and did so until the systems did their own internal capture. At least some (and maybe most/all) of them usually had a foot pedal so they could easily capture screens while playing, instead of having to reach over and hit something on the keyboard.

The first system to have any kind of frame buffer capture, as I mentioned, was the original Xbox debug kits. You had to network it in to a computer and hit a capture key there. It became standard in the 360/ps3 era, just as it became standard for users.

Happy to be corrected! I was thinking about an article I read (I believe in EGM) which talked about the process for them getting screenshots, but I didn't go hunt down the article in question and so (like a moron) I was relying on my memory. That's dangerous to do after forty, so learn from my mistake, kiddos. 

*huggles*
Areala

[MkMoveList]

Great answers. But how did they capture the high quality screenshots from arcade machines?

[Areala]

12 hours ago, MkMoveList said:

Great answers. But how did they capture the high quality screenshots from arcade machines?

I can't speak for other magazines, but EGM's editor in chief, Ed Semrad, was a photography enthusiast as well as a video game nut, and he was obsessive in his need to document every game he laid eyes on. He custom-built a camera setup which was jokingly called "The Cone of Silence" that he could place over an arcade monitor or television screen to block out external light and take beautiful snapshots of gameplay because the camera was always at the perfect distance and angle.

I imagine @TheRedEye could shine of additional light on this as well!

*huggles*
Areala

[SynthMilk]

On 11/29/2023 at 1:41 PM, MkMoveList said:

Great answers. But how did they capture the high quality screenshots from arcade machines?

For most of the 90s I think they were using the RGB capture card method described above.

I'm definitely not an expert, but it does appear that not all magazines were modding their consoles for RGB output and were instead just grabbing composite video screenshots (maybe S-Video?).  There is a very noticeable gap in quality between the screenshots in early issues of Next Generation and those in Gamefan from the same time period.

Maybe some of this was down to the photoshop/cleanup skills of the respective staff.  If anybody on here was doing this kind of work (for gaming mags) in the 90s, I'd love to hear about it. Like what kind of cleanup was actually required?  I always assumed what we saw in magazines was basically how it looked straight off the capture device.

[PixelBoy]

On 11/15/2023 at 5:23 AM, MkMoveList said:

You even have screenshots captured from when the game is clearly in motion but there is zero motion blur which you would get if you had to capture it by taking a picture of the TV.

I don't know how some specific magazine did this or that (or at least magazines you are talking about, I know how some non-English language magazines did it), but using a little bit of creativity can go a long way.

For instance as already briefly mentioned, you could use a Y-split cable and have whatever goes to the TV also going to a good quality VHS recorder. Then you can simply run the tape forward and backwards to find a good screenshot, pause the image, take a screenshot or snap a photo with your camera, and you have a very good screenshot.

And games which had internal pause, or platforms that had some cheat cartridges available with pause functions, certainly helped too.

And before Internet was a common thing, magazines in different countries could publish same screenshots, and very few people noticed that they were recycled. So, magazines which had some international connections, such as having a foreign language version, simply could use the same screenshots as the original magazine did. No need to take several screenshots in many places.