Let's take a perfect arcade gameplay photo

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

This was one of my first attempts - I think the key here is going to be accounting for the refresh rate of the monitor.

[The Happiness Engine]

Maybe a long exposure would smear the refresh flicker?

[RealNC]

On a 60Hz game, an exposure time of 16.7ms is going to give the best result. The scanline is going to be picked up by the camera exactly once over the whole frame. How you would get the camera to sync to the beginning of the scanout though, I have no idea.

[Tdarcos]

On a 60Hz game, an exposure time of 16.7ms is going to give the best result. The scanline is going to be picked up by the camera exactly once over the whole frame. How you would get the camera to sync to the beginning of the scanout though, I have no idea.

Is there a way to connect a pressure device or relay to one of the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi? If so, you could calculate the amount of time it takes the relay to fire, tripping the camera's shutter button, then figure the additional amount of microseconds to delay sending the high or low signal to that PIN.

I'm not much on hardware, but perhaps it can be a relay connected to a charged capacitor that the pin tells it to discharge, throwing the plunger.

Or if you have a camera module for the PI, program a snapshot instead of or using the GPIO pin.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Great point. That stuff is doable - in this case, the Food Fight game is from a real cabinet, not the Pi, but yeah, for the games on the Pi attaching a pin to one of the GPIO pins and having that sync up with the remote fire for a camera would be QUITE possible.