Userland Menus v24

Okay, v24 of my hijack/menus stuff is now out.

This version includes more code rewrites, mostly to minimize the number of unnecessary screen updates that used to be done (no real impact, but nice to do).

Beginning with v24, I've changed the method used to save/restore various parameters over power cycles. Prior versions stole some bits from the RTC savearea, which was used only by Mk1 players. Now the code steals eight (formerly) unused bytes from near the end of the flash savearea, so that all settings can be saved/restored on both Mk1 and Mk2 players.

This means the screen blanker is now fully functional on Mk1 players.

Other v24 changes include the working thermometer readout ("Vitals" screen), and some subtle changes to gameplay in BreakOut.

Patches and binaries are now up at http://rtr.ca/empeg/ (some folks have already grabbed them, prior to this notice!).

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Boring details of savearea: The player saves/restores state information as a 128-byte block in Flash EEPROM, so that settings like the volume/balance/etc.. can survive power cycles. Currently in the v2.00beta3 release, only the first 80-bytes are actually used, plus two more bytes for a CRC at the end of the block. My v24 patch "reserves" the 8-bytes immediately before the CRC. Someday, the player software may or may not evolve to need those bytes, but for now we've "hijacked" them!

Mark, have you any plans to change the way that your excellent menu system is invoked? I ask because I often want to re-seed the visuals. I do this with the 'Select mode' button on the remote. Unfortunately it sometimes takes several button presses to achieve the desired effect. If it takes more than two presses your menu is displayed, which can be a bit of a pain when all I want to do is re-seed the visual. I thought at first you might be able to use the '4' button on the Rio remote but that appears to duplicate the 'Mark' button. Maybe a timeout for the three button presses would be a way around it. What do you think?

No, I hope to keep the buttons the same for now.
But.. the last couple of versions (up to v24 now) have a keystroke timeout dependency. Basically, the keypress counter resets if there is a gap of 1.5 seconds or longer.

So if you just reseed at 2 sec intervals, it won't trigger the menus. I may reduce the 1.5sec further after getting more feedback on it. Btw.. press&hold also works for the SelectMode button.

Update: I'll change the inter-keypress gap limit to 1-Second next release (whenever).

Are your kernels compatible with Display Server?

Calvin

I dunno.. not using displayserver here (yet).

But displayserver will eventually be integrated into the menu system.
And at least one person here has created super-kernels with my stuff plus everything else one could want all in one package. Poke around for it.

Cheers

Great , thanks for that. I'll have to pause between button presses if I just want to re-seed. I'd tried pausing before, just in case you'd implemented it that way but didn't have any success. Looks like you read my mind .

Thanks again.

Magic. Well done.

Looks like you need to apply the ir-hack to make it two-way compatible with the display server.

Calvin