How can you take animated screenshots on the calculator?   I know you can take at each stage of the program execution etc. with screen capture, then run them all into a gif, but there's gotta be a better way.  Doesn't there?

Many people use an emulator (such as WabbitEmu or PindurTI) that has built-in screenshot recording.

Hmm... that's a good idea, but, for curiosity's sake, we'll say, does anyone know how to do that on  calc?

I don't think it's possible to make a screen shot on calc and transfer it to the comp.. there MAY be a way to do it with ASM, but I don't know for sure.

The only way to have animated screenshots directly for calc is to let your calc connected to the PC, stop your game execution exactly where you want to take a screenshot (or have pause commands accross your game), capture frame by frame, hoping the blinking cursor wont show up if it's homescreen, save every frame then use a software to assemble them together (UNFREEz allows you to assemble gif files of the same size together and is free). But then you get slow framerate and it takes a long while to make.

The only real efficient way for now is to use a digital camera, adjust it so it won't look blurry then film your calc while playing your game (or have somebody else film it or use something to hold your cam). This is what I do when I don't feel like uploading my game on my PC. Don't use a webcam, though, because they give very crappy quality most of the time. With a camera (mine costed around $100 USD) it does a quite good job IMHO:

&fmt=18

Yeah, I know. I was just confirming that this was pretty much the only way to do this and that there were no other ways. In the 8 years I've been around I haven't seen anything like this, so I assume it's either impossible or too hard to do. With assembly it would probably requires interrupt-based screenshooting to make an APPVAR containing the screen content captured every 0.2 seconds, then a PC program to convert this appvar to gif format. BUt here would come the RAM issue. Updating an archived appvar 5 times a second might be impossible. Not to mention interrupt based stuff is generally not too reliable when the TI-OS is running.

For the second way, the only real issue is that you need a cam, plus it makes huge files, which can't be opened on every computer (school, for example)

well, as I said, Interrupt based would prbly be very difficult. Back in 2005, shorthly after Reuben 2 came out, somebody attempted to make interrupt-based grayscale ASM routines for BASIC programmers and it was simply too unstable, because the TI-OS interfered too much with the routine (prbly by disabling/re-enabling interrupts and stuff the routine was using). It might be worth a try, though.

As for slow downs, if somehow the slow down is the exact same through the entire game, then the PC software could simply speed up the screenshot when converted to gif

yeah it might be quite hard to implement. It's best to stick to emulation IMHO or digital cam recording.

Back before emulator days it was almost as hard to capture console games gameplay directly from TV. You had to record your speedruns on VHS (I still have one recorded this way), which, if you had an old cheap VCR, produced very questionable quality results. Else, you had to use a camcorder. In both cases, years later, people were still stuck figuring out how to get these tapes converted to digital format without having to pay $200 for a DVD recorder

You can take screens with TI-COnnect. Only still screens and when you are using the normal key input in TI-OS...