SHP Forums

This is a good source to get screenshots and confirm them...

http://www.sierrawallpaper.com/index.php

That could be handy. I haven't been participating because I didn't like the hassle of finding a screenshot, but having all those screenshots available can let me automate the process. It'd be nice if there was an option of 640x480 or 1280x960, though, to keep the SVGA ones distortion-free.

There is also MobyGames for screenshots.

adeyke wrote:That could be handy. I haven't been participating because I didn't like the hassle of finding a screenshot, but having all those screenshots available can let me automate the process. It'd be nice if there was an option of 640x480 or 1280x960, though, to keep the SVGA ones distortion-free.

Well, they are - just as downloads, however.
EDIT: Wait, below the screen shot, there's the drop down to select a size. They're great for just needing a screen to use - or even if you can narrow down WHICH game it is in a series to quickly check them to offer a guess, and keep the games moving.

Collector wrote:There is also MobyGames for screenshots.

Yeah, true. But they're not a Sierra specific site. So I thought it'd be cool to pimp another Sierra fan site.

There are a number of resolutions, but none of them is an integer multiple of 640x480. That means the pixels will be scaled up more than the others. This distortion is very noticeable on things like text, where you can see the individual pixels.

And I see now that the 1600x1200 ones, which would be pixel-perfect up-scale of 320x200 actually have square pixels and bars on top and bottom. 320x200 is a 16:10 resolution, but was made for a 4:3 monitor, so each individual pixel is higher than it's wide. If you don't take this into account and just display it with square pixels, the image looks squished.

EDIT: The latter problem was easy to overcome. I just had to scale the image to the proper ratios myself. The former, however, is not so easily handled. It's nontrivial to undistort such an image. Also, while the "previews" of the wallpapers are the proper 640x480, there isn't a zip to download them in bulk.

My, my. And I still get some of my screenshots the old-fashioned way - by opening a game, playing a little until I find something that looks obscure, pressing "PrintScreen" and pasting it into MS Paint, then saving it as the solution... and then cutting and pasting a small chunk of the "solution" screenshot and saving it as the "quiz" screenshot...

It may sound laborious, but it's a lot of fun too. *walks off, whistling the Larry tune*

Hand-picking each screenshot like that was too much for me. I don't even know what a good choice for a screenshot would be. If you're trying to make it hard, the easiest way would be with a really small screenshot or a really generic-looking one, but then the game just stalls. If you're going for something memorable, it's just guessed immediately. And if you're trying to show something people might not have noticed when playing, it just gets really hard to find something suitable.

So now I just have a program that takes those wallpapers and spits out a random cropped screenshot (and in those cases where it shows the protagonist or a text message, I can just generate a new one). Some may be obvious, some less so. And it can point to details even I hadn't noticed.