Aha.

When you select a program from the Hijack menu, it runs more than one program instead of just the one you selected. That's why all the userland apps keep messing up and I keep losing keystrokes and the programs keep crashing and causing lockups.

This morning, after a fresh boot, I selected "emphatic" and only emphatic from the Hijack menu. I saw the "Emptris" credits briefly flash on the screen. Odd! Then, when I pressed the knob to bring up emphatic, it worked. It brought up the emphatic menu. So I know that I really did select emphatic (I was sure of it anyway).

BUT... It was flickering very fast between the emphatic menu and the emptris game actually PLAYING in an emphatic-window-sized box. Falling blocks and everything. Flickering back and forth with emphatic's menu. As if they were both fighting for the same screen real estate and keystroke inputs.

This is after selecting ONLY emphatic from the hijack menu.

So obviously, what happened is that even though I selected only emphatic, Hijack ran both Emphatic and Emptris at the same time, and now they were fighting for control of the screen.

Is this a Hijack bug, or do the userland programs need to learn how to play together more nicely? How much does hijack depend upon the userland apps to "do the right thing", and how do the userland apps know how to launch properly?

Here is the relevant section of my config.ini:

[hijack]
;@DC ;@EXEC_ONCE /drive0/var/gpsapp/gpsapp
;@DC ;@EXEC_ONCE /drive0/var/empacman/empacman
;@DC ;@EXEC_ONCE /drive0/var/emptris/emptris
;@DC ;@EXEC_ONCE /drive0/var/emphatic/emphatic -m 2 -v 0