I've just spent the last nine or so hours learning how to install preinit and Launcher, as well as various other games and such. After I successfully got preinit to work and got all the games to bind to the Hijack menu, I opted to bind just Launcher to the Hijack menu so all the games could be run from there. Here is the problem, whenever I try to run a program from launcher, it just kicks me back to the Hijack screen. Does anyone know why this is? It's kinda of got me a little angry.

It's kinda of got me a little angry.

Don't ever get a job as a software programmer then... If something like this gets you angry, you'd probably shoot up your office as a software developer. Sometimes things don't work. Get used to it...

Anyway, the behavior you've described is actually how launcher works, so it's not clear that anything is actually wrong here. "Launcher" is so named because it "launches" your apps. When you select a program from launcher, all it's doing is starting up the program, which then binds itself to the hijack menu. You then select that program from the hijack menu.

If you're launching programs and they're not binding to the hijack menu, then something else is going on, and you need to tell us what program it is you're trying to run. Also, look on the serial output and see if you're getting any kind of errors from the app.

Ideally, launching and running an application would be a one step process, but it isn't. Yet.

Ok, it looks like Emptriv isn't binding to the hijack menu at all. Empacman binds but if you run it, you can't exit and the control buttons don't move Pacman. Emptris binds fine, but if you try to run it, all it does is kick you to a blank screen you can't get out of (it might be doing the same thing as pacman with the buttons not controlling the game, I can't tell because there is no display.) Emptriv won't even bind to the Hijack menu. Help would be greatly appreciated. No erros from the serial port, the hijack just outputs that menu entrys are removed.

Can't comment on the first two, but emptriv is a little buggy in that it doesn't like being run from any directory other than the directory it's installed in. So you're gonna want to create a shell script which does something like this:

cd /usr/local/emptriv
emptriv

Or something like that. I'm going to fix that in the next release of emptriv, but that might be a while from now because I'm working on adding text-to-speech support, and I'd like to port it to use the new vfdlib graphics routines as well.

Did you start all 3 programs at the same time?
I haven't tried it with v301 but there was/is a bug in Hijack where you can't have multiple things binding into the menu without problems.

- Trevor

Yeah, I'll second that. I tried to install emptris, empacman and something else but was having all kinds of problems. So I removed everything except for empacman and it works okay now. Hopefully all these problems will be worked out soon...

later,
ajay

Hmm... as the guy who wrote Launcher, maybe I ought to read this forum a little more often...

Anyway, the behavior you've described is actually how launcher works, so it's not clear that anything is actually wrong here. "Launcher" is so named because it "launches" your apps. When you select a program from launcher, all it's doing is starting up the program, which then binds itself to the hijack menu.

That's mostly correct, but to explain a bit further... Launcher just runs programs. Before Launcher was written, programs were written to be run in a pre-init script, attach themselves to a the hijack menu, then daemonize (i.e. in the background), returning control to the calling program. To make use of Launcher, a program should not do this -- it should be written to run in the foreground, and not bind to the hijack menu. Running a program that was not written/modified to run under Launcher will exhibit the described behaviour of just returning to the Hijack menu. Since many of the programs (such as empacman) haven't been modified to not bind to the menu and to remain in the foreground, Launcher isn't really as useful as it could be -- consider it proof of concept. There's a reason I never announced it in the main forum, but I'm happy that so many people are getting some use out of it, though.

Cheers,