Need to take screen captures of firmware?

Need to take screen captures of firmware?

Postby david__schmidt » Fri Aug 05, 2011 3:24 pm

I sometimes find it useful to take screen captures of the firmware running to show some behavior I want to talk about, or whatever. Dave, The Firmware Guy was kind enough to add a screen dump feature, which may or may not be present post-beta. When you're in the firmware menu system, Ctrl-S will take a screen capture to USB, and Ctrl-C to CompactFlash. The files are named SCRNxxx.DMP, and are numbered sequentially.

The .DMP files are a copy of the screen memory area, screen holes and all. What I do is copy those files from the memory device to this disk image, called "Viewer," using CiderPress:
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0ByK7r8iz9AkeZGVhNzM5NzEtYWFlYS00NTFiLTg5NWItMzQ3ZWQxMTU2M2Mw&sort=name&layout=list&num=50

And a utility program on the Viewer disk will show the screen dumps, one after another with a keypress like a slide show. You can either take screen captures (on your real machine) for pixel-perfect renderings, or you can "print" to your virtual printer via the emulator for a text-based rendering, suitable for email. Some pleasantries in CiderPress:

First, you add the dump file itself:
Filename.png
Filename.png (25.4 KiB) Viewed 26579 times


Then, you modify the attributes - Binary filetype (CP will complain... but it's really OK), and AuxType 0400 if you are feeling fancy (not strictly required):
Filetype.png
Filetype.png (11.55 KiB) Viewed 26578 times


Then you can boot up the disk image in your emulator and view away:
Viewer2.png
Viewer2.png (11.84 KiB) Viewed 26665 times


The text rendering doesn't do reverse highlighting, of course, but just straight text:
Code: Select all
----------------------------------------
CFFA3000 v3.0                     Slot 7
----------------------------------------
CompactFlash:      |SmartPort:         
 ProDOS_1_9do.dsk   |c  ProDOS_1_9po.dsk
 ProDOS_1_9po.dsk   |c  Riskpo.dsk       
 Riskpo.dsk         |c  ProDOS_1_9do.dsk
                   |   ---             
                   |   ---             
                   |   ---             
                   |                   
                   |                   
                   |                   
                   |                   
                   |                   
                   |                   
                   |                   
                   |                   
                   |                   
                   |                   
                   |                   
----------------------------------------
ProDOS_1_9do.dsk                       
(DOS 3.3 sector order)                 


The Applesoft code to do the printing is horribly slow, and would be waaaaaaay better in assembler... if you want a little project to do.

[Updated to match final dump file naming scheme.]
david__schmidt
 
Posts: 158
Joined: Sat Jul 15, 2006 9:32 pm

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