I won't lie, I have a crappy laptop with 2GB ram, AMD Athlon 64 processor and only 256MB Video. I have tried many screen recorders but they severely lag the system. I want a screen recorder that does not have this lagging issue. I want to record gameplay of some older PSX games for archival purposes. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I am not sure how well this would be on your system but I would try fraps http://www.fraps.com/ and if your playing PSX games using a emulator I think most of them have a function in them for recording the game play
Yes, I think your best option here might be to look for an emulator with a video recording function. Programs that try to record the whole desktop (or at least window) indiscriminately without knowing anything about the game's resolution, refresh rate and whatnot are inherently more resource hungry.
Camtasia is much better than FRAPS, i still use it and it made a big difference when i had a unit like the one you mentioned CR1181995. it also has a built in video/audio editor. http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html
I've found that the great alternatives to recording would have to either be FRAPS or DXTory. I've used both equally and I can tell you that both are competent recording programs that'll get you what you want if you use an emulator. As everyone else has said, FRAPS is more resource hungry so if you are going to use FRAPS for anything, I would definitely make sure that you aren't running anything else aside from the emulator and FRAPS because you will drop frames like no tomorrow. If quality isn't an issue with you, I would recommend that if you use FRAPS to record it in half-size. Sure, it might look lackluster and you might get ghosting in your video but it won't eat up all of your resources as quick as it would if you were to use full-size. As for DXTory, as far as I know because I haven't researched too deep into it, isn't as resource hungry. I could be wrong when I say that but the setup is quite easy and overall, I prefer it over FRAPS because there are games on my computer that I can actually record using DXTory compared to recording at 20 frames per second with FRAPS. If all else fails, I would just pick up the games and/or official hardware and get yourself a low end capture card like the Dazzle DVC100 or maybe even a HD PVR if quality is a big issue. Most packaged recording softwares aren't that taxing on a system and can get the job done efficiently.
That's because the codecs between FRAPS and Camtasia are different. I wouldn't say the codec that FRAPS uses (FPS1 codec) is a lossless quality based codec, but it comes damn close to it. The reason why FRAPS produces such large files is because the codec barely compresses any of the raw capture like Camtasia does (that is of course dependent on what codec you use) so recording a Full HD (1920x1080) video or even a 720p (16:9 AR) will take up several gigabytes of a hard drive. I never had that issue because almost every single video I've ever recorded with FRAPS immediately went into Sony Vegas or x editing software (x being the variable for whatever other editing softwares I used to use before sticking with Final Cut Pro X and Sony Vegas Pro 12) and was rendered out into a more manageable format for editing and publishing.
