Help me out, gaming people

[Miss Modular]

You're talking to a woman who stopped following video games at Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.

I'm told that certain video game systems offer options where the video game background can be transferred to actual video equipment. I know of this because I read sometime back that this one guy was making a movie entirely out of video game backgrounds.

I don't remember the name of this program. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

[executioneer]

well that depends on which particular video game system you're lookign to get the backgrounds of, certain emulators will let you turn off the sprite layer (leaving just the background), but each individual emulator generally will only run games for one system so you'd need multiple programs if you wanted some backgrounds from genesis and some from SNES

[Seven Force]

If you are running Win98, you can operate Genecyst to turn on/off the background or sprite layers, as well as give you the tilesets of the backgrounds, if you're masochistic enough to copy paste from scratch.

If you're running ME or XP Genecyst won't work, so get Gens Plus. The only current Genesis emulator I know of that will allow you to add/remove sprite or background layers.

That's all I know. I assume that ZSNES will have the same functions, but I can't recall offhand.

[Miss Modular]

Thanks.

But isn't there a special name for the backgrounds, though?

[Seven Force]

I don't think so. I just call 'em backgrounds, and most people I know use the same term. That's basically what they are. There's different layers, to give a parallax effect. If you want to get technical they're just sprites that are 8 pixels by 8 pixels (unless otherwise noted) that are tiled in a certain way. I could be wrong about the name thing though, but I can't honestly tell what they would be called otherwise.

[executioneer]

and you can use FRAPS to capture video of the backgrounds, too, if the emulator itself doesn't have a "record .AVI" function

[executioneer]

ok so here are some exaples

ZSNES: Super Nintendo Emulator. Can turn on/off the sprite layer and 4 background layers by pressing 1-5 on the keyboard. As far as I can tell, no video capture, although still images can be taken via a menu you can access by pressing F1.

SNES9X: Another Super Nintendo Emulator. Toggles the sprite/background layers using the same keys as ZSNES, and has a "movie capture" mode built in, as well as a "record .AVI" mode. The "movie mode" basically only records the input from the controller, and files made with it can only be played back with SNES9X and the proper ROM, but the .AVI mode exports actual usable files. Also has a screenshot function that can be accessed with the F12 key.