If you're not sure what MACHINIMA is - a quick explination is "Capturing footage in a pre-rendered game enviroment and making a movie or skit out of it..."
That said...
I have searched for QUITE some time for a method that was fairly easy and cheap to capture DOS programs. At last I was introduced to SNAGIT. Well, I wanted to do some DOS/Sierra games for Machinima, basically as my own little solo project. My interest was capturing Torin's Passage and making it a one length cartoon (I'd have to redo the voices, since SnagIt refuses to capture DOS sound). However, I ran into some problems with the movie portions of Torin's Passage.
So I turned to some of Sierra's other DOS based games... and my first experiment was with SPACE QUEST. Just to test it out and mess with it. Here's a rough draft of a trailer I whipped up. It's 8.25 megs for like 3 minutes or so of footage. Nothing too great right now, since it's a test run, I didn't do any audio voice recordings. (In the final versions I would of course). Anyway, just wanted to show this off because I am considering doing a GABRIEL KNIGHT one as well, since GK has such an incredible story.
Anyway, if you want to check it out, right click and SAVE As... it is in WMV format, so Mac users may have an issue viewing it.
Space Quest: Rough Draft Trailer (http://www.tawmis.com/sierra/SQ3MachinimaTrailer.zip)
Well, got up around 8am... brain was firing off creative juices (and I swear, that's all it was doing)... and came up with this for Episode One of the Space Quest machinima. I did all the voices in this instance, just because I had no one available at 8am. (But I used effects to alter the voices, so hopefully it's difficult to tell it's all me).
Anyway... RIGHT CLICK and SAVE AS...
Space Quest - Episode One: The Red Pill? (http://www.tawmis.com/sierra/SQ-EP01.zip)
that's fantastic!
i could have done with a bit of dialogue during those endless walks across screens... I mean, you could type "fast" or "fastest" but with the loss of precision you spend longer trying to negotiate your way through a gap than you gain by making the legs move at the speed of light
As I move along with this (going to be doing the Space Quest one on the side, since "Neverending Nights" is our main project) - but as I do the SQ ones... I plan on doing much more with it. This whole trailer and episode one was more of a test to see if it could be done...
The most difficult part is editing the "dialogue" boxes that pop up... that is insanely difficult, because it's a Sierra game (back before voices), so everything was dialogue boxes.
Especially for the Com-Link discussion and Sludge Vohaul - it was not as easy to tell with the Com-Link convo - but both of those were like 2 second segements that I had to loop until the convo was done and capture it that way.