This is the Hall Research Technologies SC-VGA-2, sold as a “VGA/HDTV Video Processor.” In addition to slicing, dicing and pureeing, apparently, it will take any of a bundle of input formats and both rescale and resample them on the fly into the VGA or HDTV signal you desire, including 60Hz rates. This came from a seller specializing in teleprompter equipment and Hall still sells an HDMI version with additional resolutions … for around US$500. However, this or the slightly newer SC-VGA-2A and SC-VGA-2B are all relatively common devices and found substantially cheaper used. Let’s try it out and show some sample output, including those delicious NeXTSTEP system messages and some ST grabs.
↫ Cameron Kaiser
With the obscurity of some of the hardware Cameron Kaiser details on his website, I’m not surprised he has some seriously unique needs when it comes to taking screengrabs. He couldn’t very well not take the device apart, and inside it appears to be a system with two small processors, at least one of which is an Intel 8051 8bit microcontroller. Kaiser goes into his usual great detail explaining and showing how the device works.
If you’ve got unique screengrabbing needs, this might be of interest to you.
Somewhat off-topic for this article, but slightly related:
A trick I use for screenshots that are hard to capture, is using my rooted Samsung TV. I rooted it using the SamyGO tools and they also provide a tool that can capture screenshots, They are far from perfect, but quite decent and having the ability to screenshot anything I can hook up to my TV has proven quite useful at times.