Aha.

When you select a program from the Hijack menu, it runs more than one program instead of just the one you selected. That's why all the userland apps keep messing up and I keep losing keystrokes and the programs keep crashing and causing lockups.

This morning, after a fresh boot, I selected "emphatic" and only emphatic from the Hijack menu. I saw the "Emptris" credits briefly flash on the screen. Odd! Then, when I pressed the knob to bring up emphatic, it worked. It brought up the emphatic menu. So I know that I really did select emphatic (I was sure of it anyway).

BUT... It was flickering very fast between the emphatic menu and the emptris game actually PLAYING in an emphatic-window-sized box. Falling blocks and everything. Flickering back and forth with emphatic's menu. As if they were both fighting for the same screen real estate and keystroke inputs.

This is after selecting ONLY emphatic from the hijack menu.

So obviously, what happened is that even though I selected only emphatic, Hijack ran both Emphatic and Emptris at the same time, and now they were fighting for control of the screen.

Is this a Hijack bug, or do the userland programs need to learn how to play together more nicely? How much does hijack depend upon the userland apps to "do the right thing", and how do the userland apps know how to launch properly?

Here is the relevant section of my config.ini:

[hijack]
;@DC ;@EXEC_ONCE /drive0/var/gpsapp/gpsapp
;@DC ;@EXEC_ONCE /drive0/var/empacman/empacman
;@DC ;@EXEC_ONCE /drive0/var/emptris/emptris
;@DC ;@EXEC_ONCE /drive0/var/emphatic/emphatic -m 2 -v 0

Try the Launcher App, its worked wonders for me. And i have between 5 and 10 userland apps on my empeg. Launcher will save you ram, and let you lauch 1 program at a time. Its pretty nice, and very easy to setup with the config.ini

While I agree that Launcher would likely work around this problem (and I'll mess with it when I get a chance), I still think that these apps should work correctly without it, and that this is a bug worth reporting. I can envision times when I really do want all four of these apps running, or at least simultaneously available.

I think we need to locate the source of this problem, whether it's poor userland-app coding or a Hijack bug. I have a hunch it's a symptom of a simple (but easy to overlook) problem which is also responsible for many of the other troubles that we've been seeing in userland apps (such as the amazing disappearing app problem, and the slow app response problem, and they keystrokes-getting-lost problem).

Yeah, It would be nice to find the true source of the bug. But the main problem i have with binding alot of apps into hijack, is they will just eat away ram from the player. I like to only have 1 app running at a time. I don't think i've ever lauched more than 1 app from laucher at a time.

Agreed.

I've not tracked it down but I think it's a bug in Hijack somewhere. Mark thinks it's userland and I think it's the kernel I followed the example code that Mark put in the header file to show how to bind to the menu. The only change was that I didn't do the setgeometry call as it bitches if you try to use the values for full screen. The source code for empacman and emptris are both available anyway.

I'll have a better look at it tommorow anyway. If it's a problem with my code then I apologise now for pointing the finger at Mark and his changes.

If it was just with the stuff I'd written then I'd agree that it was probably me but it happens with everything that binds into the menu from what I can tell. *shrug*

- Trevor

I just installed GPSapp so I've got some to contriute to this. What happens to me with GPSapp is that it starts fine the first time, but strange things occur if I turn the car off and turn it back on again before it has really shut down out of standby. GPSapp is running and will show up when I enter the hijack menu, be the moment I turn the knob, it jumps back to the hijack screen and scrolls through the hijack menu items. GPSapp, though it's display shows up when I go into the hijack menu, is not in the hijack menu.

Matthew

Whoops. Forgot I said I was going to look at this.
I'll see if I can get it done in the next day or so.

- Trevor

*BUMP*

I just had it happen again this morning. Ran Emphatic, and instead saw GPSapp flickering as it fought for control of Emphatic's window drawing space.

I'm working on it! It's still on my huge todo list...

- Trevor