HUDs seem to work by downloading hand history files from poker software. This requires the cooperation of the websites.

I was curious if any HUDs worked by visually recognizing what is going on and generating hand history files. If poker bots can recognize the action and work, why can't HUDs and tracking software do that too?

I am assuming most programs use screen scraping as a last resort. It's not that reliable.

I used to write HUDs years ago. I used 3-4 different techniques, depending on what barriers the site had.

1. easiest/first way: the first try I did, they were using an off the shelf open source SSL library. I downloaded the source and modified it to dump the decrypted stream to disk. Reverse engineered their (fairly simple) protocol and from there it was a piece of cake

2. second easiest way: some sites would dump all the action to the chat window if you set it to verbose, and make it fairly simple to retrieve the text from the chat box.

3. third easiest way: some sites would do the above but make it difficult/impossible to retrieve the chat box text. I used "library hooking" to overcome this. Essentially in windows you can say "whenever someone tries to use this library function, call my function instead" I'd replace their calls to the windows functions that write text to the screen and intercept it that way

4. finally, the hardest way: basically, your suggestion, to retrieve it from the screen. I used basic OCR techniques plus a few I may have invented myself. It worked OK. It had limitations - nothing could occlude the screen, it had to be at a specified window size. It was painstaking to develop compared to the other methods.

1. Interesting. Well I known enough to know I do not have the time to learn to code. Just trying to find a workaround to save hand histories from Global Poker.

2. Would you be interested in being contracted to develop a hand history scraper for global poker, provided you do not release it publicly? This can come from any source- chatbox, visual recognition, or downloading from their cumbersome hand history page? PM me if so. Just need it to work; doesn't have to be pretty.

To be honest, I've tried to play on global poker from 3 different computers, and it never worked for me. So I would have to say that I am not particularly interested. Also, you probably can't afford me.

Don't reinvent the wheel. The tool that you need is already being advertised on 2+2 (it's useful to read the Commercial Software forum from time to time). That said, Global Poker might eventually ban hand history scrapers explicitly and take measures to disrupt their work.

Sincere thanks to both of you. This is exactly the information I was aiming to get with this post.

QUOTE=coon74;52480694]Don't reinvent the wheel. The tool that you need is already being advertised on 2+2 (it's useful to read the Commercial Software forum from time to time). That said, Global Poker might eventually ban hand history scrapers explicitly and take measures to disrupt their work.[/QUOTE]

It's not so easy to ban, because historically there's always been ingenious work-arounds for leet programmers.