It has already been said, almost :) Why not simply adding a function that enables/disables restoring the last info/visual mode at boot? Rather than a sequence of key presses, it could be a specific independent function "Reboot with last used info mode: ON/OFF".

Okay, I just took a run at implementing this, and.. hit a snag.

The problem is, if the player was NOT in "visuals" at power off, then holding down the BOTTOM button after power-on will not restore visuals.. instead, it cycles to the next "info" setting.. which is worse than nothing.

So for this to work, we somehow have to figure out whether visuals were active at power-off, save that info at power-off, and then check it at power-on.

Now.. anybody got any bright ideas as to how we could possibly have software "figure out" that visuals are active? There are just too many info screen formats to easily screen-scrape them, I think.

Figure that out for me, and the rest is trivial..

-ml

Mmmm... Wasn't there a patch out there that would allow the player to boot in whatever status it was when shut down? I am quite sure I already saw that here in this bbs, but could not find it ?!
Otherwise, I don't know how to help you, given my limited programming skills. Thank you anyway for trying, Mark!

Mmm I'm not sure what you mean by the player being "in visuals"... There are three info modes which show you the visuals (None, Line, and Transient.) I think we can detect which info mode we're in by reading from the empeg_state block like I mentioned before. Was there a problem with that approach that hasn't been discussed here yet?

Anyway back in the day Borislav wrote a "persistent settings" kernel hack which got around this quite nicely (among other things). I don't know if the method he used has been overcome by events, but take a look at what he did. Some of the problems his patch was originally meant to fix (separate beep settings for home/car, etc.) have been fixed by Empeg, but they won't budge on the visuals at startup thing.

Anyway see if these links are helpful.

thread
kernel patch

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about the settings in flash.

Okay, I'll put out a v82 later on, with an option to force "info transient" on reboot in the car, but only if a visual mode was active before the last in-car shutdown.

Or maybe even be more clever and restore "info line" or "info off" as well.

-ml

See the announcement in Main->Programming (shortly).