WoW, er Wine on Windows--Re: Still more fun?

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Augustus Saunders wrote:

>As for what we hope to accomplish, well, it might seem like massive
overkill to try using WINE,
>but it's the only plausible way I've come up with.  Basically, we want
to substitute all the
>graphics/windowing/GDI etc so that we can record all the
painting/rendering into some kind of
>WMF type thingy.  The idea is to get screen captures as metafiles that
are perfectly screen-accurate.
>There are numerous ways to grab a bitmap rendering of a window/screen,
but that's useless.  Also,
>you can (sometimes) get an application to print to your metafile, but
that is for printing documents
>and does not show the application as it appears on screen. The end
result?  Essentially vector
>graphic screen shots.

I think what you are trying to do is actually API hooking. There are
ways to do that as
explained in older MS System Journals and most probably also on
www.sysinternals.com. 
Alternatively I'm quite sure there is already some mechanisme built into
Windows to do
that. Two possible things come to my mind. If you make a screen capture
with the "Print
Screen" key, Windows seems to place a WMF or EMF format onto the
clipboard already. And
WMF/EMF is basically nothing more than a stream of GDI opcodes and its
parameters as
they are passed to the according GDI function.
Alternatively you might want to look at how some of the recorder
application do their
work. I believe that there used to be a MSDN sample screen recorder
application which
might give you a start on how to do these things.

Using Wine for this is most probably not very effective. You don't want
to have DLLs
reimplementing GDI and other low level Windows systems, and only
forwarding all calls
to the real system DLLs would mean modifying the Wine code to such an
amount that
Writing that code from scratch might be actually simpler.  

Rolf Kalbermatter