Is there any way to take a screenshot and then save it as an allegro bitmap to be able to display it?

al_save_bitmap("screenshot.bmp", al_get_backbuffer(display)) might work.

I don't mean take a screenshot of the program and save it. I mean take a screenshot of the whole screen and have it as a bitmap. Something like this.

ALLEGRO_BITMAP *screenshot = al_take_screenshot();

Ah... that can't be done with Allegro.

You have to get the HDC of the desktop on Windows and then blit the screenDC into a compatible memoryDC and then you should be able to access the specific pixels and write to a bitmap.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18858638/how-to-get-a-screen-image-into-a-memory-buffer

Users can do that with screenshot utilities, which run by default in pretty much every OS. Why would you want redundant functionality in your program, when it's as easy as pressing Print Screen?

How about

al_save_bitmap("screenshot.bmp", al_get_backbuffer(display));
ALLEGRO_BITMAP* screen = al_load_bitmap("screenshot.bmp");

But really what you probably should do is triple buffer. https://wiki.allegro.cc/index.php?title=Triple_buffering

Keep a bitmap the size of the screen and draw into that, https://www.allegro.cc/manual/5/al_set_target_bitmap then draw that to the screen. You now have a copy of what is on the screen and you can redraw that at a later time.

Ok I figured out how to do it from here http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/windows/105644/ . I saved it as a jpg and loaded it with allegro.