Capturing DMD screens

[Steve S]

Is there an easy way to capture DMD screens from existing games?  I'm envisioning a board that would sit between the display controller and the DMD display and save the data being displayed to a file, so it could be reused when converting the game to use the P-ROC controller.  Conceptually it seems easy enough - I might try it with an Arduino board, if there's not already an easier way to do it (the Arduino might not be able to keep up, but it's worth a try).

--Steve

[gstellenberg]

It might be more convenient to write a software tool and use it in conjunction with pinmame.  Either way, you'll need to capture the row data from the control signals and recreate the frames.  Alternatively, maybe you could grab a video capture of the dmd sequence (either real DMD or visual pinball dmd) and write something to pull the frame data from the video at your desired frame rate.

- Gerry

[ecurtz]

I haven't looked at the specifics of the DMD handling in PinMAME yet, but you could certainly use it for this. You might have to capture the full display and re-compress everything into your chosen format though.

[russdx]

You could also rip the original pinball roms apart and find the DMD frames