Conference hydra::amiga_v1

I'm afraid I don't have a solution to your problem.  I use the screen blanker
built into Qmouse.  This utility has a lot of nice features, and also provides
mouse acceleration.  It doesn't do any nifty animation on the 'blanked' 
screen, though.

If Pyro is public domain, could you upload it?  Most of the things on 
Amiga Times aren't really public domain, so be sure before uploading it.

Steve

    I used PYRO for a while but noticed that I was crashing a lot.  After
    a couple of weeks of checking and REMOVING PYRO, my machine did not
    crash at all.  I left my machine on all the time and was getting a
    consistent crash whenever I accessed (moved the mouse or touched a key)
    it in the morning(or the screen was blanked for an extended period of
    time).  MYMENU also crashed my system when I had PYRO installed.
    
    I got rid of PYRO and am now using the latest version of Mackie.  I do
    not crash, all my background tasks and processes coexist peacefully,
    and Mackie draws some "mean" line art.
    
    
    	Mark
    
    p.s. PYRO and Mackie are in the FISH archives.

    I use ClockDJ (or is it DJclock?), found on Fred Fish Disks. I looked
    at many programs also - This one places the time in my title bar, has an
    adjustable mouse blanker, adjustable screen blanker, mouse accelerator,
    "pop to front" window option, "rotate screen" option for the Amiga-M
    key, displays free chip and fast ram in my title bar, and is written in
    assembler so it is real small. It hasn't yet caused a GURU on my
    system. All options are adjustable (even "turning them off"), and
    everything is accessable from Workbench pulldown menus.

    I should mention that I use Qmouse v1.6 as my mouse accelerator,
    screen shuffler, etc...  I only use MACKIE as a screen blanker because
    of the variety of line art drawings it uses.  You have 5 choices of line
    art drawings or you can let Mackie shuffle through them all randomly.
    
    md

    
    
    Have you tried using another great P.D. program
    
    
    		RUNBACK...
    
    This runs the program in batch mode ...
    
    	A friend has PYRO on an A2000 + GVP 3001 and has no problem
    with it...
    
    		Steve G 

Re: QMOUSE

I recently switched to CLOCKDJ and it's great!  I was running QMOUSE but found
it crashed Amy a lot when I was using SID.  The way QMOUSE has implemented the
SUN mouse some how disagreed with SID. I use CLOCKDJ in SUN mouse mode and have
yet to have a crash.


...Ed

    I tried Pryo and some other blankers, nice, but they don't meet all
    of my needs.
    
    Any suggestions for a screen blanker that watches for joystick input?
    It's nice that they detect mouse and keyboard activity, but it's no fun
    when Pyro takes over the screen in the middle of a joystick based
    game.
    
    -Dave

    I use SUN mode in Qmouse and also use SID v106 occasionally and have 
    not crashed, hung, or anything.  It works perfectly.  ClockDJ does have
    an ARexx port(I believe).  I might give it a try just to see what 
    ARexx will do for me.  While I am on the subject of ARexx, does
    anyone have or know of a tutorial on ARexx?  The manual is great for 
    reference but....
    
    
    md

    re .7
    
    I have yet to see a screen blanker that reads the joystick.  Can anyone
    think of a good reason why it couldn't be done?
    
    My blanker-du-jour is called "starblanker" and can be found on one of
    the newer Fish disks.  It provides you with a star view a la the
    starship Enterprise at warp speed.  Either from a forward-facing view
    or a side-facing one depending on random chance.  I use it with dmouse
    but be aware that you *must* turn off (-s0) the blanking capability of 
    dmouse before starting up starblanker.  Guru's can result if you don't.  
    Since I got it right, I've had no problems.   I have no way of telling,
    though, how much CPU time is being consumed by the streaking stars.
    
    (On that subject: Is anyone aware of a system monitor that will collect
    data over given interval?  I use Xoper to look at the system at a given
    instant, but I'd like to collect statistics over, say, a ten minute
    period.)
    
    
    -Gary

Re: .9

>    I have yet to see a screen blanker that reads the joystick.  Can anyone
>    think of a good reason why it couldn't be done?

Most of the screen blankers work by attaching themselves to the great
chain of input events flowing through the input.device.  

The input.device is the part of AmigaDOS that acts a central conduit
for input.  Whenever some part of AmigaDOS recognizes an input
event (a keyboard key press, a move of the mouse, a disk inserted
or removed from a drive), it sends the input event to the input.device
for further dissemination.  A moment in the life of the input.device
goes something like:

	"A keyboard key was pressed, I'd better send it to the
	 active window."
	"A disk was inserted, I'd better inform the Workbench and that
	 program with the 'Please insert disk' requester."
	"The mouse moved, better tell Intuition."

The input.device watches for (or more accurately, is informed about) all
sorts of input events.  However, "all sorts" doesn't include the
joystick port.  I don't think any part of AmigaDOS looks at the
joystick port routinely.  And, although I've never written programs
that use the joystick port, I've gotten the impression that you
read it by watching the hardware directly.

No input events mean that screen blankers that only watch for
input events can't see the joystick.  Thus, they don't realize
that blanking the screen now means you will have a hard time
dodging the missiles in Amoeba Invaders.

    Re .8...  There's a tutorial on the latest Jumpdisk.  I haven't
    purchased it yet, so I don't know how good it is.
    

    2 quick questions:

    (1) How come we (qmouse, avail, WB title) can't agree on how much
	memory we've got? Right now, WB says 498K, avail says 492K & 
	qmouse says 486K. Not that I'm quibbling about a few K, just
	curious what they each use to arrive at their numbers.

    (2) How big is ClockDJ? I just started using QMouse a week or so
	ago, getting tired of giving up 20K to the CBM clock. 4K of qmouse
	is a lot easier to take; is ClockDJ bigger or smaller?

						    -Dom

A previous reply about STARBLANKER warned about turning off
the built-in blanker in DMOUSE by using '-s0'.  Well, I did that
but my system often gurus  when I move the mouse to reactivate 
a screen which is 'blanked' with STARBLANKER.

-Peter

    I use Starblanker with Qmouse and have no problems.  I use Qmouse to
    blank the mouse but not the screen.  I had problems with a previous
    version of Starblanker but this one-I cannot remember versin number,
    v2.10 I think-runs great.  What version of starblanker are you running?
    Maybe a problem with Dmouse?
    
    FWIW
    
    mark

    I tried Starblanker for a while (don't know which version, but I
    downloaded about the January '91 timeframe).  I would often load up ten
    or fifteen songs into my sequencer and play them through my synths
    (kinda like a CD player).  When the screen got blanked and the stars
    came on, the timing of the songs was noticably affected.  That tells me
    that too many resources were being used by the screenblanker when the
    system was blank.  If it was doing that to my music, what was it doing
    to my renderings going on in my unattended Amiga?  I immediately got
    rid of the nifty starblanker and went back to QMouse for blanking.
    
    Terry
    

I seem to have overlooked this stuff before. Since I'm tweaking blankers
now, I went back over all of it. So some of this is rather old.

1) Either Blankette or MadBlanker on one of the recent Fish disks watches
for joystick events, and unblanks on them.

2) StarBlanker chews up a lot of CPU. I've got a version that runs at a
priority of -100. If the screen blanks to that with a background compile,
I now get a blank screen.

3) I believe that all released versions of starblanker have a debugging
kprintf call left in, and scribble stuff on the serial port whenever it
starts. Beware of this.

4) The most recent release of starblanker lets you set two corners; one
which causes it to never blank (for games), and one which causes it to
blank now.

5) I'm working on the Mother of All ScreenSavers. Unfortunately, a critical
piece of it requires 2.0 features. Watch for it after 2.0 goes to ROM.

	<mike

    re: Mother...
    
    will it have flying toasters?
    
    Dave

If someone gives me the anim file of flying toasters...

	<mike

    hmmm... you might have something there... could you have a way to
    specify an external program to use for the blanking?  "After Dark" on the
    Mac (I think that is what it is called) proved the point that sometimes
    people are willing to trade cpu time and memory for a really neat
    blanker animation - such as flying toasters.  After all, there are
    times when you run out of things to do, that's why the system is
    "idle" enough for the blanker to run.
    
    Besides, think of the shock value.  Mild mannered amiga sitting quietly
    in the corner, suddenly bursting into the 1812 overture with Cannons
    while displaying fireworks.
    
    Dave
    

I've already got a way of running external programs as savers. In fact,
that's the only kind it supports. I've also got a way of inserting "utilities"
between the commodity and the savers, which allows chaining the utilities
together so you can use more than one of them. The only utilities written
to date are on that guards a corner (it doesn't blank if the mouse is in
a corner), and one that reads in a file and runs a blanker chosen from a list,
runing another at user-selectable times.

I just got the configuration hooks working, and as soon as I get configuration
tools written for all the existing savers/utilities, I'm going to put
together savers for running anims and Rexx scripts. Sometime in between, it's
going to switch from alpha to beta testing.

BTW, so far everything either runs at a priority of -100, or spends most of
it's time in Wait() calls.

	<mike

    I have been trying to get the screen Blanker program in 2.04 to work
    on startup. If I put the blanker program in WBstartup, it will 
    pop up the window for me to hide. If I type Blanker seconds=300
    in shell, if works fine. What I would like to do is have the
    Blanker program time out 300 seconds with out any help from me on
    boot up. I tried a text file with BLANKER SECONDS=300 typed in it,
    but it did not work. The manual is not real clear about it, so I 
    need a little help here. 

    Thanks  Bob

    Single click the icon for BLANKER and choose "Information" from the
    pull-down menu.  Change CX_POPUP to NO and change SECONDS to 300.  It
    should work as desired after that.
    
    Tony

Hi Bob,

	This ones easy. First be sure to make the changes to the Blanker
	Icon thats in the WBStartup drawer NOT Tools/Commodities/.

	Just open the workbench WBStartup/Blanker icon and use Information
	from the main menu bar and set the tool types CX_POP=NO and
	SECONDS=300. Thats it. The blanker should auto start on next reboot.

	See chapter 8 page 8-20 for other tool types.

Bob

>	This ones easy. First be sure to make the changes to the Blanker
>	Icon thats in the WBStartup drawer NOT Tools/Commodities/.

These are correct instructions if you *move* or *copy* the Blanker tool
icon (and associated tool) into the WBStartup drawer.

As I mentioned elsewhere, another way to achieve this is to place a Project
icon in WBStartup, which references SYS:Tools/Commodities/Blanker as its
tool.  In that case, you must make the tooltype changes to the version in
Tools/Commodities.  While slightly more complex to set up, I feel that this
is preferable for long term maintenance.

	Paul

> As I mentioned elsewhere, another way to achieve this is to place a Project
> icon in WBStartup, which references SYS:Tools/Commodities/Blanker as its
> tool.  In that case, you must make the tooltype changes to the version in
> Tools/Commodities.  While slightly more complex to set up, I feel that this
> is preferable for long term maintenance.

I just created a LINK to the original...

john

    Thanks,  I got blanker to work just the way I wanted it to.  I remembered
    reading something about blanker, but could not find the note.

    Thanks for the help.  

> I just created a LINK to the original...

I have been resisting the temptation to use links until I have a version of
QuarterBack which supports them.  Is that available yet?

I haven't read the 2.04 documentation very carefully yet.  Do they describe
the implementation of links?  These are only hard links aren't they?  What
happens if you delete the target of a link, or overwrite it, such as might
happen in a future installation?

	Paul

re    <<< Note 3638.6 by AKOV11::SMITH "Reality, just a visible imagination?" >>>
>               -< What out for QMOUSE V1.6  (SUN mode) and SID >-

> Re: QMOUSE

> I recently switched to CLOCKDJ and it's great!  I was running QMOUSE but found
> it crashed Amy a lot when I was using SID.  The way QMOUSE has implemented the
> SUN mouse some how disagreed with SID. I use CLOCKDJ in SUN mouse mode and have
> yet to have a crash.


> ...Ed

	I think I've stumbled on another crash prone combination of 
directory utility and blanker;

	Spliner & DirWork (most recent version on FF570), especially
when DirWork is initialized from AmiDock.  I'm also disabling Spliner 
during my VLT/Z_Modem/WATN experiments, just to help isolate things.

	R