Taking Screenshots in Alpha Centauri

[Qloos]

I'd like to know how to do it.

[Petek]

Item #44 in our FAQ describes several techniques for taking screenshots:

(Note: Most of the below information is several years old and may or may not apply to current graphics cards.)

44) Q: Are there any ways to take screenshots without the colors being wacked up?

A: Yes, two good ways to do this are:
1. In the Alpha Centauri.INI file, add the following line:

DirectDraw=0

(Must be added to the [Alpha Centauri] section.)

This allows you to take a screenshot during the game, then exit the game, and paste into a graphics program.

However, when this is used, you can not see anything when you Alt+Tab out of SMAC/X. I.E. you can't read instant messaging windows when this line is in the Alpha.INI file.

2. Alternatively, you can run the graphics program while running SMAC/X. Take the screenshot as usual. Then, Alt+Tab to the graphics program and paste. Initially, the colors might look distorted, but once you quit SMAC/X, the colors are fine.

3. Actually, you can change the color-depth back to normal while SMAC/SMAX is running, and it will continue to work just fine. Shadowlord actually made a program some time ago to automate doing just that, but never posted it anywhere (Shadowlord had written it for friends originally). It just runs terran.exe and then uses one of the windows API functions to restore the display settings to normal (which means the display color-depth, mostly, but it also changes the gamma back, at least on some machines).

Shadowlord attached a zip file here which contains two EXEs, one which waits 30 seconds after starting terran.exe before changing the color-depth back to normal, and one which waits only 1 second. There's a (very short) readme too.

You can use it with Alien Crossfire if you rename the EXEs (there's no way to tell this to run terranx.exe instead of terran.exe, so you have to rename them). There would probably have been four EXEs if I had had Alien Crossfire when I wrote this, but I didn't, and I don't want to hunt for the source in HD backups now.