As a lot of longtime followers have probably noticed, since getting my Retrotink 5X upscaler about a year and a half ago, much to my own surprise, I've somewhat transitioned away from playing most old games by emulator and have gone back to playing on real hardware, at least when it's, let's say, fiscally viable to do so. Big OLED screen aside, it's been genuinely nice to play these games more or less in their intended context and interestingly, I find that the forced disconnect from my computer means that I'm generally a lot more focused since I'm not switching back and forth between the game and social media.
One thing I do miss in this setup, though, is the ability for me to spontaneously capture screenshots specifically for posterity, either to cover a game more extensively later or just to share something fun or neat that happened. I want to rectify that, but I'm having trouble figuring out the best way to go about it.
Here's my main problem: as far as I can tell, unlike video capture, there are no standalone devices that you can just chain in-between a console (or more precisely in my case, an upscaler) and the TV and capture a screenshot with the press of the button. If such a device does exist, I'd love to hear about it, but I've spent genuine hours searching the Internet for such a thing and I've come up with absolutely nothing. I don't consider those standalone video capture boxes to be an adequate substitute, either, because I don't want to just constantly record video of it and then try to scrub it later for the screenshots I actually wanted. Not only is that more tedious than it's really worth, in my opinion, but I'm guessing I generally can't count on those devices to offer lossless recording to extract pristine screenshots from anyway.
This leaves me with two alternative ideas I want to run by my fellow chosters that are mostly the same idea, just packaged in slightly different ways. If folks have opinions on which option would work best or if you have a better idea entirely, I'd love to hear it! Anyway, here's what I'm thinking:
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A custom built desktop PC in a small case, probably a Mini-ITX. This would contain basically the bare minimum hardware, so no dedicated GPU or anything like that. The only thing extra I would throw in is my high end Avermedia capture capture that I already have into the PCIe and works great with my Retrotink. Avermedia has recording software that can specifically do lossless screenshots as well, so the plan would be to have that running in the background and then just map the screenshot function to either a simple hotkey I can press from a handheld wireless keyboard or a dedicated button for that purpose, inspired by how game press folks used to use foot pedals for that purpose. The screenshots themselves would be saved to network storage for easy access on other devices.
Upside: Modular, can be repurposed for something later if I come upon a better solution later.
Downside: I don't really enjoy doing desktop builds and setting everything up would take a decent chunk of time. Also general space/wiring concerns having such a thing in my living room next to my TV on top of all of the other devices I've got stationed there. -
Buy a self-contained mini PC (I've been thinking something like this] and basically an equivalent high-end Avermedia standalone USB/Thunderbolt device to replicate the rest of the setup described above.
Upside: Teeny computer! Much smaller overall footprint even with the USB capture device attached to it. And I don't have to put it together from scratch, either.
Downside: More or less the same cost as building my own PC, but with far less long-term flexibility in terms of ways it can be repurposed after the fact. Mini PCs with ports that can properly handle high-end standalone capture devices also still seem fairly rare?
Long story short, I'd love to hear any opinions folks might have about my options, especially if there's anybody else out there doing something similar with physical game hardware. The end goal is to ultimately have a PC that's relatively low-power that I can just constantly have on in the background to capture pristine screenshots in as streamlined a manner as possible. Like I said, this probably won't be used for anything else whatsoever because my existing desktop and laptop otherwise serve my needs perfectly fine, so I'm trying to reign in cost where possible, even if budget itself isn't otherwise a huge concern.
Thanks in advance! 🙏