Enhancement: Screen saver feature

[jonathanlundstrom]

Hello again!

I've noticed that when emulationstation goes idle it just dims the screen and puts a white little dot centered on the screen. Would it be possible to get a screen-saver like feature where the screen dims down at a user-configurable level and displays an image?

If easier, could you make it so that the screen goes into sleep, only to be woken up at keypress? I just feel that it's kind of unneccesary to have my screen on constantly, even when I'm not playing. For instance, when I transfer files to the arcade machine through SFTP or similar.

Thanks in advance!

[HorstBaerbel]

If you run ES in a X environment you should be able to do this by setting the environment variable SDL_VIDEO_ALLOW_SCREENSAVER=1
In Windows it "should just work" (tm).
The SDL screen saver functions are not available in the SDL 1.2 version that is currently usedin ES. SDL 1.3 and probably 2.0 have them...

[Aloshi]

If easier, could you make it so that the screen goes into sleep, only to be woken up at keypress?

Err, it actually does exactly this right now, after 30 seconds. Unless you mean actually put the monitor/TV into sleep mode, which I'm not really sure how to do.

@HorstBaerbel It's currently recommended that you don't launch ES from X, because it breaks some emulators' input (namely RetroArch). I wouldn't be averse to updating to a newer SDL version though. The only problem is that there isn't one in the Debian repository right now (so it's a bit of a pain to install). I think the only SDL code that would need to be updated is the Renderer_init_*.cpp stuff and the InputManager.

[HorstBaerbel]

I think the monitor sleep mode is what Jonathan means. Here http://superuser.com/questions/206622/turn-off-monitor-energy-saving-while-in-text-console-mode-in-linux are some hints on how to do this when running the console. You could try it in combination with before mentioned environment variable and post your results here.

It personally think this is nothing ES should handle. I can understand though that it might make sense to disable the screen saver, the standby functions or change the global volume before running some emulators. This could be a global or per-emulator setting...

And, yeah. Switching to SDL 1.3 should probably wait till the 1.3 or 2.0 is in a proper Debian package for Ubuntu / Raspbian...

[jonathanlundstrom]

Hi, sorry if I was not clear enough. It works good as it is, but just as you said, I mean actually putting the monitor into sleep.

As far as I know, most monitors do this automatically whenever they stop receiving a video signal. So if there was some way to disable the video out, and launching it again on keypress it would be awesome. I wish I could help out, but my programming skills only extend as far as web development goes.

[unixunion]

Hi,

I am running ES via xorg, and have been unsuccessful in getting xorgs dpms to turn off the monitor. I have tried exporting the SDL variable as mentioned above but no luck. is this something that cannot be forced via xset commands somehow?

/Kegan

[nilsbyte]

You can choose between DIM/blackscreen now in v2.0 RC1. You even can set the timespan.