Is it possible to display the clock while the empeg is off? In detail is it possible to program the Empeg to display the time while it is in the car. The accessory and memory power lines to the Empeg are on. The Empeg is turned off. Is this something that could be done in hijack or in a user app?

Thanks

The VFD display is hard-wired to the standby mode. When the VFD is on, the player is on and the amplifiers are turned on. When the VFD is off, the player is in standby mode and the amplifiers are turned off.

So if you have the VFD turned on, then the player is on. So if you want to display the clock, the player has to be on.

If you want to display the clock without playing music, there is a very nice "pause" button you can use.

One of things I've noticed is that when you type "player" from terminal mode that the VFD comes on while the Empeg resets. I just wonder if the code couldn't be changed to allow it to stay on while power is applied. I would like to have the player be able to show the time, perhaps in a double font while the player is not in use. It's a feature I would certainly use.

My point is that if you did so, the amplifiers in your car would be on all the time, too.

I should add that one of my plans with the alarm clock app I've been (slowly) developing is to add a setting to allow an on-screen clock which sits in a user-defined area of the screen all the time, regardless of info mode setting, what mode the player is in, etc. This is something I've always wanted because I think it's silly to combine timecode of a song and the time of day into one setting, and foolish to think that the clock visual is a good enough solution for a device that's got so much flexibility. Why should info modes, your choice of visual, and on-screen clock display be mutually exclusive in most cases?

The problem for me now is that Hijack does not currently let applications display a window on the screen and then return control back to the player (kinda like running an Xterm window in the background). Technically the user apps can let all the button presses pass through, but you can't access the hijack menu until you "quit out" of the app, which means the hijack menu would be disabled while this clock overlay was displayed, among other limitations.

So until the user app interface changes a little, I can't really implement a usable on-screen clock. But given this feature, it'd be easy enough for me to do. Once Mark digs back into Hijack a little more I hope this interface is looked at more closely. However I don't think this would be one of the easier things to implement, so it might take some time.

This doesn't really do anything for your "clock while Empeg is off" request, but I think it's an interesting aside.