How to do screen dumps on targets with bitmap LCD display

Why screen dumps?

When writing the manual or wiki topics, it's always nice to include a screen shot. For web-use you should convert the image to PNG, which is best suited for this type of image (JPG will make it look blurry and BMP is uncompressed, and not supported by all browsers).

Taking screen shots on the real target

When the screendump function is enabled, it takes a snapshot of the LCD frame buffer each time you insert the USB connector. It will not enter USB mode, but instead save a BMP file.

To enable the screendump, select Menu->System->Debug (keep out) ->Screendump. To disable it, select it again.

File names

The screen dump files are stored in the root directory of the Rockbox unit. If the unit has RTC (real-time clock), the files are named "YY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS.bmp" (YY=year, MM=month, DD=day, HH=hour, MM=minute, SS=second). Otherwise, they are numbered sequentally, dump_0001.bmp etc.

UI Simulator

Using the UI Simulator you can create screenshots on a PC. Build the UI simulator for the target device and set up the emulated simdisk folder as you want. When the simulator is running, press F5 or 0 on the numeric keypad to dump a BMP screenshot (file naming is the same as described above) to the simdisk directory.

Have fun!