XP and Launching HS on secondary screen

[Camous]

I am in the process of building a Groovy mame setup to be used in a cab.

My goal is to have a fast starting system and avoid any windows interface elements ever showing up in screen.

This is easy enough, for speed I go with XP since it boots in 5-10 seconds.

To avoid windows elements showing I just extend my desktop and use the screen in my cab as the secondary. That way I can have it show nothing but a black screen except when displaying mame or HS.

With mame this is easy as I can assign the output screen in the ini files.

HS does not have this option currently, and I really feel that it should be added since it would be so simple to do.

Meanwhile I am forced to use a utility called ultramon which lets you launch a program on a certain screen.

For HS 1.3 this works only for the first few seconds as HS starts up then within 3-5 seconds goes to black screen.

With 1.4 HS starts up fine, but once you enter a game and return HS suddenly jumps from the secondary screen to primary.

I doubt I can solve this issue using software, so I guess I am humbly requesting the choice of default HS screen be added as an option.

[Camous]

I guess the team has other fish to fry, eh?

Well, depending on how HS is coded it should be easy to implement.

[ninja2bceen]

BBB is on a long vacation. You may get lucky if you ask on the forum rocketlauncher. Vjdj or Brolly may be able to ahk it? I'd say post the ultra man app in the tool section since this is new

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[Camous]

Akh's are for RocketLauncher, right? Then that is a no go. I had to give up on getting RL to work, I launch the MAME exec directly through HS, not using RL or HL.

[ninja2bceen]

Ahk is general computer Lang. They may be able to help

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[Camous]

Actually after a bunch of testing I figured out why the screen goes to black a few seconds after HS is launched. That seems to have nothing to do with running HS on a second screen. Rather it seems to be the result of my graphics card crashing. This actually happens in both HS 1.3 and 1.4

 

Not sure what HS does to cause the graphics card to crash though. I am using a Radeon Hd 4650 which I specifically bought to use with CRT emu driver as the HD 4xxx series Radeon cards are recommended to use with those drivers.

 

Not sure whether this is because my card does not like the way HS uses it or whether it has something to do with my OS environment. Ah, PC's, gotta love 'em.

[Camous]

After even further testing I now know what part of the frontend is causing the crash. It is the videoplayer. I was wondering why the crashe would happen a few seconds after HS started and noticed that gameplay videos were set up to start playing around the same time. So I removed all the videos from the video folder and now HS fires up fine.

 

I am thinking this might be an issue related to video acceleration. HS seems to be relying on internal codecs so there is no way of fixing this from that end, and I do not think that I have access to any video acceleration options of my video card.

[Camous]

In case anyone is interested in the solution to the above. You just have to convert all your videos from mp4 to flv. This is most certainly a hardware acceleration issue. There was a somewhat similar issue with some intel chipsets in the past.