Since I was having lots of trouble using these video game recorders this past Feb., I gave up on them, but a few days ago I thought of an idea - since my XnView would not do any screenshot captures of the video sequences in these Theatre games that I'm playing, I created a Windows XP VM in VPC 2004 last night, installed and played one of my Theatre games, using XnView to see if it would do screenshot (with XnView set to capture "active window", playing the games in a windowed Win XP VM on my netbook) captures of the video sequences in Episode 1 - well, it did the captures of the video sequences but on random screenshots there is a rectangular block of missing content in the upper mid-right/right side of random screenshots, this block is the same general color of whatever is the color of the background (solid color) of the video while the remainder of the screenshots show a snapshot of the video sequence proper.

I think this has to do with my VM's screen resolution for the game because when starting the game I get an error message about it cannot switch screen resolution that the game needs - the VM's screen resolution is at 640 x 480 at a Medium (16-bit) color depth. I believe that because VPC uses a s3 video, it uses SVGA.

How do I eliminate this block of solid color (mentioned above) in these screenshots taken of the Theatre video sequences when using XnView?

Thanks in advance.

I don't know if anyone here knows the answer to that.
Maybe you could ask over at the XnView forum
http://newsgroup.xnview.com/

Thanks for the tip, Jenny. I just posted the above message over there - but now I ran into another problem: The Windows XP Home guest OS in this VM says I have 30 days to activate it, and I tried to activate it, but although my netbook is connected to the internet, how can I get this Virtual PC VM connected to the internet just to activate the guest OS?

I mean, the guest never asked me for the product key at all when I installed (or did a fresh reformat, reinstall) it from a 2nd Windows XP CD this evening - how do I get it to bring up the product key page with its boxes??

I've got VPC 2004 at the moment, so later versions may be slightly different.

The XP virtual machine cannot be running when you add a network adapter to it.

Start Virtual PC, highlight your XP VM, and click the Settings button. Do you see a Network adapter listed there? The window should look something like ***this***. If you highlight "Networking" you should see the name of the network adapter over on the right side of the window. If it says "number of network adapters" is zero, change it to "1" in the dropdown box over on the right and click the OK button.

When you start your XP VM, XP should automatically detect the new network card and install a driver for it. You can test the internet connection with IE or by opening a command window and typing
ping www.gameboomers.com
If the pings get through, (or if IE works) you have an internet connection.

Assuming you have a legal version of XP which is not in use elsewhere, you can activate over the Internet by clicking the icon for it in your taskbar. This guy tells you how to update over the Internet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvgOpSosgX4

Hello I'm back. I activated the Windows XP in this VM, so that little problem is solved - now for this remaining problem with the screenshot captures/VM screen resolution -

Here are some screenshots taken using XnView; the first 2 show a screenshot of the intro video sequence of Theatre (Episode 1) and Shady Brook respectively and the last shows the error message I get on my Windows XP VM upon exiting both games from within the VM. Both games installed successfully in the VM, but they both run kind of choppy-like.


screenshot of Theatre intro video sequence;


screenshot of Shady Brook intro video sequence;


Note the rectangular block displacing/cutting off the top middle/right part of these screenshots.


Win XP VM screen resolution error message

Really, I don't think the problem lies with XnView, I think the VM screen resolution might be causing this?

If so, how to fix it?

Perhaps create a Win XP VM in VMware Player (which I also have installed on this netbook) and use this instead of the VPC Win XP VM?


I still didn't get an answer to posting my problem (original post about Jenny100's post) at the forums at XnView.

My guess is that the XnView problem has something to do with the way the screen is refreshed inside VirtualPC. If you move the window around, does the rectangle show up in a different place? It would be interesting to see if the same thing happens with VMware Player.

I don't know the resolution that Theatre uses, but Shady Brook uses 640x480. If you changed your XP inside Virtual PC to 640x480 before starting the game, it would probably make the window smaller, but it might also avoid the error message.

I wonder... Is this the location of your mouse at the time you capture the screen?

When I did the screen captures, I always made sure that my mouse pointer was off the VM's screen; that is, it was on the host's screen.

What does it do if you put the mouse pointer over in the corner of the VM's screen?

Check your PM's - what is the resolution of the game, and how much memory are you allocating to the VM.

Shady Brook's resolution is - "640x480 resolution, 24-Bit Color display" but I cannot find out the Theatre game resolution, I mean, that Italian website where I d/l the episodes from don't say.

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Just found out (from the games website) that Theatre plays in Win 98 - so I'll install it under Win 98SE in (first) Virtual PC and see if I get better results.