a lot of Apple II games are still missing their screenshots - an oversight which I'm more than willing to help rectify, but there's the small matter of accuracy, which leads me to this question.

As mentioned in this old discussion, a lot of existing Apple II screenshots are pretty bad, on account of emulators that don't implement NTSC correctly (if they even bother to try at all). Fortunately, there's now a recent fork of the Applewin emulator (AppleWin NTSC) which aims to fix just that, and does a much better job at it.

Would screenshots from this emulator be accepted? Considering the endless debates on here over the years about emulator screenshots, a sample is probably in order... here's one from Choplifter, which you can compare to the existing one here.



To clarify: I don't intend to start going around replacing old screenshots, at least not for now - just to take new ones for games that still lack them, which is probably a higher priority.

Servo: this is one for you, how does this look?

....a slight *bump* for Great Justice. No word on this?

Sorry, I didn't notice this thread. That looks great to me, much more accurate than the older emulators. I would definitely accept those.

Nice - good to know. Could exact aspect correction and/or border size be applied as well? Or am I pushing it? ;)

(that's another question that already came up once, IIRC, but for the life of me I can't find that thread now...)

Those mountains at the bottom look way too detailed, compared to this screenshot. Is it tricky technique for NTSC display or just different animation frame?

Those mountains are made up of alternating orange/blue stripes; the existing screenshot has the colors all wrong - for one, the blue is way too dark, so those extra stripes don't even seem to be there unless you look closely. Is that what you mean?

Keep in mind that shot you're comparing too isn't very accurate; it uses a much rougher approximation of what a real Apple II would look like. For most systems we would want a pixel perfect shot, but some older systems like Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Coco 1/2, CGA composite, etc, have very prominent video artifacts and sometimes even rely on them, so the artifacts have to be emulated (pixel perfect can't really be done; what you actually see on screen isn't quite the same as what's in the frame buffer!). Given that a pixel perfect shot for the Apple II is very difficult (if not impossible) I'm not opposed to the border/aspect corrected version, but is fine and probably easier to just leave as in the original one. Either way I would encourage using this emulator over the older ones as the results are much more accurate!

No borders, please.

How did you do to take the screenshots? The built-in screenshot functionality isn't working for me. I can of course capture the whole emulator window, but I don't know exactly how to crop from there.

There are a lot of free utilities that allow to batch crop images, like ImageMagick or IrfanView.

That I can do, just have to figure out the coordinates

With Irfanview you have an option to capture only the client area of an emulator, so you don't have to figure out the coordinates.

AppleWin adds some extra borders that still have to be cut down or you end up with a 602x422 resolution

Does this look ok?



Compare with this

Yeah, the screenshot hotkey didn't work for me either. To determine the crop area I used an image that completely fills up the Apple II framebuffer, then made a selection of 560x384 pixels and centered it precisely over the image within the full window. The latter part has to be done by hand, but the resulting coordinates would be good to go for all subsequent shots.

Note that due to the nature of composite video, horizontal edge artifacts may actually extend into the black border by a single pixel on each side, but since we're excluding the border area there's no real way (or need) to account for that.