#144228 - 18/02/2003 18:38
emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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After a couple weeks of hacking, here is another emphatic release. This MAJOR release includes a number of bug fixes which should help out with some of the problems of the initial releases. Horizontal scrolling speed should stabilize better, and overall performance should be better because I'm using a new ID3 tag library, and because the reading of lyrics is now in a background thread. This library also reduces the bloat of the executable from 2+ megs to under 400k. Hoo hah!
But who cares about bug fixes? Well how about some new features! emphatic isn't just a lyrics viewer anymore. With a few additions to your config.ini (see examples in the README) you can have *customizable* full-screen info modes, which can also have lyrics on them. Fields on the custom info screens can scroll, and the scroll behavior can be configured (again, see the README, it's kinda complex at first.) If you want other ID3v2 fields available for the custom info screens, let me know.
Also new in this release is the ability to use remote buttons for emphatic's menus. Again, read the README. 
Anyway, there are probably still a bunch of bugs. The custom info mode is experimental, and the new ID3 tag library works for me, but hasn't been widely tested yet. Let me know how you fare with this version, and as always, report any bugs right here.
Go get it, folks!
http://empeg.webhop.net/
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#144229 - 18/02/2003 18:39
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14491
Loc: Canada
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#144230 - 18/02/2003 18:57
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Thanks... Custom info stuff wouldn't have been possible without your help on reverse-engineering hda3. That's how I'm getting the plays count, last played, running order position, running order length, etc. for the custom info modes.
One thing I mentioned in the README, but should probably mention here so everyone doesn't think it's a bug. emphatic now hides itself when you change the volume or use the front panel down button, so you can see what playlists you're selecting, etc. Tap the knob and emphatic will show itself again. Also, to switch between modes (horizontal -> vertivcal -> custom) you can hold down the knob for a second or so. If you don't have any custom info modes defined (in config.ini) then the "custom" mode won't be available.
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#144231 - 18/02/2003 19:13
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 31/08/1999
Posts: 1649
Loc: San Carlos, CA
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<homer simpson voice>Mmmm, shiney. Drool.</homer simpson voice>
But your readme file on the site is out of date (it describes the previous version still).
-Mike
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#144232 - 18/02/2003 19:17
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: mcomb]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Thanks, fixed now. README inside the gz file should be correct though.
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#144233 - 18/02/2003 20:21
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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addict
Registered: 14/01/2002
Posts: 443
Loc: Raleigh, NC
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Bug report:
Selected the custom mode (used your Track Info-like configuration provided in the README)
- Firstly, the track title doesn't show up. Everything else seems to be there.
- Second. If I go into the Player menu, and hit the knob button, the display goes back to the custom mode, but if I grab the screen using Jempeg, it's still in the menu. If I press the left/right buttons, I can see the selection in the menu move around, and the track doesn't change. Only once I hit the top or bottom buttons will the display go back to the Player..
- Third, I'd like to request the time as a field (maybe down the road, have it customizable too)
This is it so far.. more as I find it.
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#144234 - 18/02/2003 20:27
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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member
Registered: 25/10/1999
Posts: 149
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Dramatic performance improment. Great job, yn0t_.
And I'm finally able to access the ID3v2 comment field. 
Well, actually I can't get emphatic to give me the custom info mode option when trying with a simple example. Anything wrong with my syntax?
[emphatic]
custominfo1=vscroll "comment" medium 0 0 128 32 10 0 -1
However, the flexible way you implemented this feature looks promising.
_________________________
_______
Thomas
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#144235 - 18/02/2003 20:29
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: Yang]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Firstly, the track title doesn't show up. Everything else seems to be there.
Ack! That's a bug. But the title WILL display. I think the bug you're hitting is that when searching for the [emphatic] section, the first line after the section header is ignored. So put a blank line after the section header and I *think* you'll be okay.
Second. If I go into the Player menu, and hit the knob button, the display goes back to the custom mode, but if I grab the screen using Jempeg, it's still in the menu. If I press the left/right buttons, I can see the selection in the menu move around, and the track doesn't change. Only once I hit the top or bottom buttons will the display go back to the Player..
I have no idea what you're saying here. I've re-read it 3 times and I can't figure out what problem you're experiencing.. I get the first part, up until "if I grab the screen using Jempeg." What is the problem here?
Third, I'd like to request the time as a field (maybe down the road, have it customizable too)
Thought about that myself, it'll be in the next release.
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#144236 - 18/02/2003 20:30
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: 753]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Well, actually I can't get emphatic to give me the custom info mode option when trying with a simple example. Anything wrong with my syntax?
Yeah, your syntax is subject to the bug I described in my previous response to Yang's bug report. Put a line in between the [emphatic] section header and the custominfo line and try again.
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#144237 - 18/02/2003 20:31
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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enthusiast
Registered: 14/09/2000
Posts: 363
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Cool!
The horizontal scrolling is much better now. The big blank spaces look much better now as short breaks.
I've noticed a couple things tho... I can't seem to get to the hijack menu when emphatic is running. Now I'm wondering if 1.0 was like that too.
The executable is smaller, but it still uses just as much ram:
#0 51 2.4 3.7 2804 552 ? S 20:36 0:14 emphatic
#0 54 0.0 3.7 2804 552 ? S 20:36 0:00 emphatic
#0 55 0.5 3.7 2804 552 ? S 20:36 0:03 emphatic
#0 57 0.0 3.7 2804 552 ? S 20:36 0:00 emphatic
is that unlikely to change?
Stripping the binary brings it down under 200K.
Ok, I've only read the readme and haven't created any custom info modes, but I'm impressed. That's a lot of flexability!
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#144238 - 18/02/2003 20:38
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/01/2002
Posts: 3937
Loc: Providence, RI
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I have no idea what you're saying here. I've re-read it 3 times and I can't figure out what problem you're experiencing.. I get the first part, up until "if I grab the screen using Jempeg."
I assume he's getting a screen grab. Does "Jempeg" (I assume jEmplode) grab from /dev/display or /proc/empeg_screen.raw? I assume the former, which would explain this. It's not a bug. That's how it works, if that's where it grabs from.
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#144239 - 18/02/2003 20:41
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: TheAmigo]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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I've noticed a couple things tho... I can't seem to get to the hijack menu when emphatic is running. Now I'm wondering if 1.0 was like that too.
Hijack limitation. Can't do anything about it. The very act of emphatic looking like it's in the background is some minor trickeration also. (Technically it's running in a 2-pixel area on the lower left, which you can sometimes see if the play/pause icon is displayed.) I'm just working with what Hijack gives me.
Not sure if there's any smart way to improve Hijack in this regard, but right now Mark is busy enough with Linux stuff, sleds, and tuners that I don't think he's thinking about this kind of stuff.
is that unlikely to change?
I don't think I'm doing anything particularly memory hoggish... I'll ship it without symbols next time so the executable is a little smaller, but I'm not sure where I can save on RAM. If anyone finds any obvious bloat in my code, they're more than welcome to fix it.
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#144240 - 18/02/2003 20:41
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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member
Registered: 25/10/1999
Posts: 149
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That's been it. Now on to a more creative custom info screen than a one-liner.
_________________________
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Thomas
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#144241 - 18/02/2003 20:43
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: 753]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Cool, let us know what you come up with.
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#144242 - 18/02/2003 20:45
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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enthusiast
Registered: 14/09/2000
Posts: 363
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Something's wierd with 1.1 and the lyrics for One Week (I grabbed the .lrc off your ftp server).
Using the 2nd sample custom mode (from the readme), no lyrics show up until about 1:35 into the song. Then for the next 30 seconds or so, they go flying across the screen in a mad dash to catch up. A ps right then shows that the most any of the emphatic threads has used is 0:29s of CPU time since boot (been scrolling lyrics for about 10 min so I guess that seems normal).
It's done the same thing twice now out of four times, the other two times it's been pretty normal.
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#144243 - 18/02/2003 20:47
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: TheAmigo]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Hmm... uh... what's the ReserveCache value in your config.ini? If you haven't set it, make sure it's in the neighborhood of 32 or 48.
Man, Animaniacs and now One Week.. You trying to murder my little program?
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#144244 - 18/02/2003 20:55
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: Daria]
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addict
Registered: 14/01/2002
Posts: 443
Loc: Raleigh, NC
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Erg.. yea.. I meant Jemplode.. (All those 'emp' names are getting me confused lately..)
I mention it because if the menu is still active, left and right change the selection in the menu, and not do previous or next track. As the Emphatic screen is up, it looks like nothing is happening.
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#144245 - 18/02/2003 20:58
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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enthusiast
Registered: 14/09/2000
Posts: 363
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From the FAQ, I'm not sure I understand ReserveCache, but I have it set for 45 (without that, ttsd, emphatic and empire all at once was too much).
It looks like it tells the player to use less RAM for caching, is that about it?
Yeah, it's the torture test. I like to push stuff to the limits. With ttsd, I started with a couple words, then went for Hamlet's soliloquy... it chose "not to be".
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#144246 - 18/02/2003 21:02
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: TheAmigo]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Okay well if you need all that other stuff running, maybe ReserveCache=64 will be better for you? The behavior you're describing (emphatic gets WAY behind) sounds like the player is fighting with all your user apps for RAM. When that happens, things get REAL slow and I've seen the player actually complain about not being able to get memory when my ReserveCache was set real low. I'm not guaranteeing this will fix your problem, but it's worth a shot.
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#144247 - 18/02/2003 21:06
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: Yang]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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I mention it because if the menu is still active, left and right change the selection in the menu, and not do previous or next track. As the Emphatic screen is up, it looks like nothing is happening.
Hmm.. You mean when the *emphatic* menu is active... Oh... Hmm. I'll look into that. I'm trying it on my player now and when the emphatic menu is active, the left, right, and bottom buttons aren't working... Is that what you mean? That's a bug, but it's easy enough to just close the emphatic menu and then when you hit the bottom button, emphatic will hide itself. Right?
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#144248 - 18/02/2003 21:13
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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addict
Registered: 14/01/2002
Posts: 443
Loc: Raleigh, NC
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Not really. When the custom mode is active, and the bottom button is pressed, emphatic goes away and the menu comes up set on playlist.
If the knob is pressed, emphatic comes back up, but since you never leave the menu, left and right then navigate the menu behind the scenes. Until you hit the top button to get out of the menu, left and right won't change tracks.
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#144249 - 18/02/2003 21:19
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: Yang]
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enthusiast
Registered: 14/09/2000
Posts: 363
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Ah. Just use the wheel to navigate the menu, it hides emphatic.
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#144250 - 18/02/2003 21:25
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: Yang]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Not really. When the custom mode is active, and the bottom button is pressed, emphatic goes away and the menu comes up set on playlist.
That part is a feature, not a bug. The idea is that if people want to pick playlists, emphatic needs to hide itself so they can see what they're doing.
If the knob is pressed, emphatic comes back up
So you want to use knob presses to select items in the menu instead of the down button? Umm.. That doesn't work. You'll have to train your brain to use the down button. You can still use the knob to quickly rotate the playlists, but when you want to select one, you gotta use the down button.
but since you never leave the menu, left and right then navigate the menu behind the scenes. Until you hit the top button to get out of the menu, left and right won't change tracks.
To give you an idea of what I'm working with here, I can't tell what state the player's menu is in. If Mr. Hijack wants to expose some userland calls to tell me whether the menu is active or not, maybe I can do something about this.. He does have some screen-scraping of some sort built into Hijack, I just can't get at it.
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#144251 - 18/02/2003 22:01
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 20/12/1999
Posts: 31597
Loc: Seattle, WA
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Okay well if you need all that other stuff running, maybe ReserveCache=64 will be better for you? The behavior you're describing (emphatic gets WAY behind) sounds like the player is fighting with all your user apps for RAM. When that happens, things get REAL slow Yeah, that's what's happening to me. So what changed when going to 1.10? On the prior version of Emphatic, I didn't need to put any reservecache in, and it worked fine.
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#144252 - 18/02/2003 22:23
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tfabris]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Really? The changes I made in 1.10 were designed to make it perform better. Basically, the lyrics are read in a background thread instead of the main loop (including the button input) having to wait. That's where you'd see things getting really unresponsive in 1.01.
Without ReserveCache, even 1.01 slowed down on me. You should at least have 16 cache blocks reserved, that's hardly stealing any from the player.
Though there are two variables here, one is the new thread, the other is the change in the id3 library. I wonder if I should release a version of 1.10 with id3lib instead of libid3tag. Maybe the extra 2MB in executable bloat is worth it if id3lib is overall faster.
I'll do some more experiments on my own player and report the results... I'm running on a Mk2a with the extra 4mb of RAM though...
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#144253 - 18/02/2003 22:26
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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addict
Registered: 14/01/2002
Posts: 443
Loc: Raleigh, NC
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So you want to use knob presses to select items in the menu instead of the down button?
Not really.. The answer I was looking for was: Only turn Emphatic back on when it's out of the menu.
Now that I've thought about it, I understand that Emphatic is only a overlay and shouldn't be thought of as a player mode.
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#144254 - 18/02/2003 22:29
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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enthusiast
Registered: 14/09/2000
Posts: 363
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Basically, the lyrics are read in a background thread instead of the main loop (including the button input) having to wait.
Maybe you compromized a bit too generously and that thread's at too low of a priority.
I did make sure I wasn't actively using ttsd (it was 98.5% swapped out), not sending IR, not typing in my telnet session, I hadn't recently touched any buttons on the player, nor had I just booted the player. pretty close to standard conditions.
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#144255 - 18/02/2003 22:47
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: TheAmigo]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Umm.. hmm. Do you happen to remember if the area where the lyrics usually live was blank when this happened? Like, was that area blocked off, and just blank for the first minute or two? That would tell me a little about what you guys are seeing...
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#144256 - 18/02/2003 22:49
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: tonyc]
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enthusiast
Registered: 14/09/2000
Posts: 363
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I was using a custom info screen and it kept updating the time/total numbers, but the lyric scroller area (bottom) was blank.
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#144257 - 18/02/2003 22:50
Re: emphatic v1.10: Custom info modes!
[Re: TheAmigo]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Oh, so this is only when custom info mode is on? Tony, did you also have custom info mode on?
Did you have a lot of info fields doing scrolling and what-not? Not like that should matter, but that does add to the number of things the program is doing...
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