What I like doing is capturing Lara at strange positions-in the middle of a handstand, while rolling and while jumping- and grabbing action scenes-Lara fighting with raptors and other enemies, escaping from spikes and traps, making a narrow escape from a collapsing building e.t.c. I also have a tendency to take screenshots of Lara dying-please don't send me hate e-mail for that! And of course, when I am in a nice place ,such as the first area of the level Coastal Village in Tomb Raider 3,I don't forget to capture the screen. I usually try to take screenshots of the cutscenes, but this slows down the performance of my video card. It's a pity that you can't take screenshots of the FMV's(try it and you'll end up with a black image).
Anyway,now that I've given you some ideas on where to take screenshots,let's see how you can take them:
PC
Tomb Raider 1:Bad news. Tomb Raider 1 runs in DOS, so you'll need a separate screen capturing program. You can find some screen grabbing utilities
here(thanks to
Stella for the link)
the link)to
Tomb Raider 1 Gold(Unfinished Business):Press the forward slash key "/" and the system will start taking screenshots in .pcx format and will not stop until you press "/" again. You can find those screenshots in your tomb raider directory-where the .exe file is.
Tomb Raider 2 &Tomb Raider 2 Gold(Golden Mask):Pressing the "s" key while playing will cause the game to take one screenshot-and you won't need to press it again to stop like in Tomb Raider 1 Gold. The screenshots will be saved in .pcx format in your TR2/TR 2 Gold directory or in .tga format if you are in 16.7 million colour mode. If you run on Windows 95/98 you may also be able to use the print screen function, by pressing the key named like that, and this will copy a bitmap to your clipboard which you can paste into an image editing program-such as Lview Pro or Paint Shop Pro.
Tomb Raider 3 & Tomb Raider 3 Gold(Lost Artifact):You can take screenshots by pressing the apostrophe key ['] -haha actually this is a greek word-and they will be saved in your TR3/TR3 Gold directory as .tga. If you run on Windows 95/98 you may also be able to use the print screen function, by pressing the key named like that, and this will copy a bitmap to your clipboard which you can paste into an image editing program-such as Lview Pro or Paint Shop Pro.
Tomb Raider 4 & 5:Screenshots can be taken by pressing the apostrophe key ['] and they will be saved in your TR4/TR5 directory in .tga format.
NOTES:1.Screenshots in .tga format-which stands for Truevision Targa- are usually quite large-depending on your screen resolution and color quality. They can be easily compressed into jpg's without visible loss of quality. There are several Image Editing Programs which support them, but plenty of them such as Microsoft Paint do not. I'd recommend downloading or purchasing
Paint Shop Pro or
Lview Pro in order to view and modify them easily.
2.The default Tomb Raider Directory for the PC in Windows is:
C:\Program Files\Core Design\Tomb Raider xx (where xx is the name of your Tomb Raider Game).
Macintosh
All Tomb Raider Games:Press F13 or Shift+Tab for screenshots in PICT format
PSX/PS1
This information was provided by any_door. Please contact him if you have questions, comments, or just want to say thanks.
You can pull screenshots from PSX or PSOne, too, provided you know what model of PlayStation you have and what equipment you need. With any model PlayStation you will need to have a PC, the software required to grab images (Hacking Utilities from GameShark.com or GSCC from GSCCC) and a means to connect your PlayStation to your PC.
If you have a PSX that has the Parallel I/O port on the back (SCPH 100x-7xxx), you can take advantage of this port by installing a plug-in game enhancer. However, to be able to grab screenshots using this type of device, it must be equipped with a DB-25 parallel port. The most popular device of this type is the GameSharkPro. After this is installed, the last thing you will need is a DB-25 male-to-female cable. The female end goes into your game enhancer, the male end to a parallel port on your PC.
If your PlayStation does not have the Parallel I/O port (SCPH 900x), you will need a CD type game enhancer. In addition, you will need a Comm Link cable. This plugs into the back of you PlayStation through the Serial I/O port, and plugs into a serial port on your PC.
In either case, the use of the software given above is the same. Once everything is connected properly and the software is installed on your PC, you will first need to ensure proper communication between your PC and your PlayStation. This is done by having the game enhancer at its Main Menu and then using the PC software to establish a "Comms Link". Once this is achieved, go to the area of the PC software that allows you to grab images.
Now comes the weird part. Grabbing images from PlayStation requires you to press the Reset button at the moment you want to grab. The image you were viewing before you pressed Reset is stored in the PlayStation video RAM. Once the game enhancer main menu has reappeared you are ready to initiate the image download.
Say, for instance, you're writing a walkthrough for TR:TLR and you want to show how to make the bull in Guardian of Semerkhet charge and hit one of the three "eye" buttons. As soon as Lara has jumped out of the way, and the bull has hit its head on the button (and if the image you see is descriptive enough), hit the reset button. Then download the image to your PC using the software.
The image will be in Bitmap (.BMP) format, and will include, not only the image you grabbed, but will show other "off-screen" items as well.
Now go out there and grab some pics of Lara!
