Yes, it seems to me I partly misunderstood the purpose of the project (what you intend to do on a PC, in particular), but I too find your logic fuzzy (regardless of my job :)): if you are in fact conceiving this software for a PC as well, then how is it going to work, in that specific case, without a GUI? I think the PC part misled me.
I'm prepared to admit its confusing. The player software has a UI - it generates an "image", the image being 128x32 dots of 2 bits per pixel. It is a graphic, so it could be argued either way but by most definitions it is not a GUI as it does not interact with anything. i.e. its fixed size, no "real" menus in a GUI sense, no Z ordering, no interaction with a desktop etc.
You may have missed the earlier parts of this thread, this image is a desktop (X11) application for viewing and controlling the player.
http://www.jonshouse.co.uk/display_on_x11.jpgIf you follow the youtube links you see examples of the player running on MK1 and MK2 empeg hardware, a Raspberry Pi board driving an LCD display and a Raspberry Pi board driving an LED display.
The player itself sends its graphics via UDP (networking) - it is the job of the display (in the case above a program called 'display_on_x11') to render the image so the user can see it. The player itself is not aware of the front end, it just accepts button pushes (or text commands) and does "stuff" with them :-)
Another way to think of the is that Centro player is a server, the program rendering the front end is the client.
so since you said you're creating a new software part to be used on current hardware and PC, I assumed that "current hardware" could include touch screens, and PC referred to in-car PC (and all that implies)
Well yes and no. As microsoft have discovered its a different way of working to drive something with a touch screen, the empeg is a button driven interface. You could emulate the buttons with a touch screen by pushing an up/down/left/right button (as in the graphic above) but the sofware itself remains button driven.
The software can be extended (its open source after all), its possible to hack into whatever interface you would like. The software runs on real empeg hardware, linux PCs and Pi boards (confusingly with or without a front end !)
In "master/slave" mode the player can have multiple front ends at the same time - think two or more displays and buttons but one player.
Even I think understanding it is tricky, I will write some proper documentation for it one day :-)
Hope that helps.
Jon
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