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|                         ***   Ski Capture   ***                           |
|                                                                           |
|                        Screen Capture Utility For                         |
|                            Anything's an Icon                             |
|                                                                           |
|                           Version 1.0 Primitive                           |
|                     copyright 1995  Chester Karwowski                     |
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 DESCRIPTION:

     This is a very primitive screen capture utility that is included in
 the Anything's an Icon package.  Both the screen capture utility, and the
 Icon Editor are copyrighted, and released as shareware.  Currently
 "Ski Capture" is very limited.  It was designed to capture the screens of 
 games written in either 320x200x256 VGA or 640x480x256 SVGA.  These two 
 modes are the most common graphic modes that modern games use.  Ski Capture 
 is a TSR program that you must run before you play the game you would like
 to capture screens from.  Once it has been run, it will remain in memory
 until your computer is rebooted.  
 
 DIRECTIONS:
 
     To run Ski Capture you must change to the directory where the file 
 SKIGRAB.EXE is located, and type SKIGRAB.  After running SKIGRAB, you may 
 load and start playing a game.  Once you have found a screen that you would 
 like to capture, you must hit the ` key, and the screen will be saved as a 
 bitmap into the directory from which you ran Ski Capture.  The bitmap 
 filenames are selected as follows: ski00001.bmp, or ski00002.bmp, or 
 ski00003.bmp, . . .  If ski00001.bmp exists then it will be saved as 
 ski00002.bmp etc. . . 
     Once you have captured a screen from a game, you may then load the
 Icon Editing System, and convert the graphics from the picture into an 
 icon.  See the help files that accompany the icon editor for more 
 information about this conversion.

 WHY USE SKI CAPTURE:

     Most screen capture utilities are TSRs that intercept the keyboard 
 interrupt vector in order to allow you to tell the them when to capture 
 the screen.  But, these TSRs will not work if the game that you are trying
 to capture from also intercepts the keyboard interrupt.  This makes them 
 useless on some great games that could supply some great screen shots.  
 Ski Capture intercepts more than just the keyboard interrupt vector, and 
 tries to make sure that it maintains control of the keyboard.  
 Unfortunately, some times this means more mid-game crashes.  It may take
 you a few tries to get all of the screens that you might want to capture.
     Hopefully future versions will be much more stable, and reliable.  
 We are also testing some additional methods of capturing screens which will
 capture from even more games, but unfortunately these methods are currently
 very unstable, and crash way too often to release.

 CURRENT PROBLEMS:

     Because this screen capture program is so invasive, it occasionally
 causes games to lock up when it is loaded into memory.  This is especially
 true if the user attempts to capture several screenshots in rapid 
 succession.  It is possible that these lockups might cause space to be  
 reserved on your hard drive without actually putting the bitmap into it.
 Lost clusters are frequently created when a program is interrupted
 while trying to write to disk.  They are not serious, but they do waste 
 hard drive space. You can recover the missing hard drive space by 
 typing:    CHKDSK /f     from the DOS prompt.  This command scans your 
 hard drive, locates missing clusters, and fixes them.  It is a good 
 idea to run CHKDSK or SCANDISK periodically anyway just to make sure you 
 are getting the maximum space out of your hard drive.

 FUTURE VERSIONS AND REGISTRATION:

     If you are a registered user of Anything's an Icon, then you will 
 receive future versions of Ski Capture as a part of your upgrade packages.  
 If you choose not to register Anything's an Icon, but would like to 
 receive future (more capable) versions of Ski Capture, then you may send 
 a letter or email to the author (address below) to explain your desire for 
 future versions of Ski Capture.  Please include a list of the abilities or
 options you would like to see in a future version.  If you wish to make a 
 big impact, a small donation ( < $5 ) would help us to realize that there 
 is a market for such a product.  Please include your email or regular mail
 address with any replies so that we will know how to contact you in the 
 event that a future version is created.
     Currently, upgrading Ski Capture is a low priority, but if enough
 people are interested, we would consider increasing it's ability.

     If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me at the 
 following address, or through email at:    skikar@erols.com

                  Chester Karwowski
                  1502 Green Valley Ct.
                  Bel Air, MD 21015-4758

