I saw this pic of a Panasonic CQ-DF903U and thought the display looked nice. (I think it's the font that makes it possible) If this is possible with the Empeg's display, consider this a vote towards it. If that font was on top of a visualization, it could look sweet.

-Hoagy.

I think that the resolution of the empeg's display is not high enough to reproduce that effect. Or, rather, if it did, it would obscure most of the visualization.

Remember that the empeg's display is only 128x32, and even the small font takes up, what, six vertical pixels? So adding at least two pixels for a border, possibly more, means that the small font would take up a quarter of the screen. Maybe that's not so bad.

I think that the resolution of the empeg's display is not high enough to reproduce that effect. Or, rather, if it did, it would obscure most of the visualization.

That's part of it. The other part is that the empeg display doesn't have very many shades of gray to allow for that fine detail.

HOWEVER... this inspired me to actually try it in logoedit and see what it would look like.

Okay, agreed, you can't get as much text on the screen, and the blend between the image and the text isn't as neat looking... BUT... it doesn't look half bad. To wit:



You know, it occurs to me that something like this could be done as an extension to Emphatic (with lots of new coding and some additional font files).

Gee Tony... where did you get their new album I have been looking for that.

That looks awesome Tony! That font would add some serious bling bling to the Empeg.

-Hoagy.

I actually think it looks quite nice. But I'd rather have it as an info mode (Info: Text Overlay?) than an extension of Emphatic. Perhaps it's time for me to make my first wishlist request.

That actually does look pretty good. Of course, it'd have to be transitory, as it almost totally obscures the visual going on underneath. But it would look slick as such.

Of course, you realize I'm cheating with that picture. For example, I've overlapped the two lines of text by a couple of pixels, a real screen at that size would obscure even more of the visual because the descenders and ascenders couldn't overlap like they do in my faked image. And a lot of song titles would be too long for the screen and would have to scroll (a lot more than with the current font because that font is larger). Etc...

Still, I think something like this could be do-able as a userland app launched by Hijack. Have the player do Info:Off and figure out a way to query hijack for when the menus are up (so you can make your text disappear so it doesn't obscure the menus... doesn't emphatic do this already?).