screen reading

Hello all,

I am trying to write a program that will read the screen, looking for certain images, or pixels, I guess.

I'm not quite sure where to start, I thought I was looking for 'screen scraping', but that appears to have been a term relinquished to the web world for simple html parsing, and that's not what I'm trying to do.

An example of what I want to do would be to collect the value of the cards that are popping up in a video blackjack game. I can't access the code for the blackjack game, so I'm just going to have to 'read' them off the screen.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to get started? I'm working with vs.net 2003.

Thanks...

Okay, I've broken this task down a little, but I'm not sure if I'm going about this the right way. Any insight is appreciated.

BTW: Moderators, please move this to the appropriate forum if I'm not already in it.

I think I can accomplish what I want by grabbing a screenshot of the window itself, then scanning the window by pixel (can I do this?) for a certain pixel location and testing what it is. I could repeat this several times to ensure that I think I'm seeing what I'm seeing, but this seems like a long process (having to keep testing for each possible item on the screen until I find what I'm looking for)

Second, I have the actual images that I'm looking for, in this case, the 52 cards of the blackjack deck. Is there a way to do a "compare" on the screen image against each card image to see if the card image matches anywhere on the window's screenshot?

Has anyone done something like this before?