[pygame] pygame fullscreen help and joystick hat issue

[Brian Sturk <bsturk@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

    Hello!
        
        I've been using pygame for a very long time in an settop
        emulator frontend I've written.  It works great, but there's one
        thing I haven't been able to do well and I'm looking for ideas
        on how I might be able to improve it.  The pygame program runs
        in fullscreen and launches *other* fullscreen programs.  I've
        tried many different techniques (different python calls, flags,
        etc) for launching to have everything work cleanly and each
        thing I've tried has issues.  
        
        What I'm doing now is before launching I set my pygame program
        to go back to windowed mode before launching the fullscreen
        program.  This works but is clunky in that it sometimes causes
        issues with Windows window focus, timing, etc.  The program also
        supports pre launching a program before the emulator (and is
        done async).  This is mostly for joystick/keyboard mapping.
        
        Is anyone else doing stuff like this, and if so how are you
        doing it?  I use a frontend on my MAME cabinet called
        AdvanceMenu which is C++ and uses SDL and it works perfectly and
        just calls system().
        Any ideas to try would be greatly appreciated.
        
        If it helps, I've put my program here, relevant code starts @
        line 1483:
        
        https://www.dropbox.com/s/wq2t2rl6irmbysn/frontend.py?dl=0
        
        Unrelated, there's a specific pygame method, joy.get_hat(),
        which seems to have an enabled debug print (it also could be
        compiled into the SDL library itself).  I tried using a trick I
        found online to suppress it by mucking with the file
        descriptors, but it didn't seem to help.
        
        Here's a screenshot of it
        
        https://www.dropbox.com/s/dpf0sbydol7fvc5/sdlhat.jpg?dl=0
        
        One of the prints is mine (the one with "DEBUG:"), but the other
        is from SDL/pygame.  It's not a huge deal, but calling that in
        the event loop causes that to show up a LOT and could be a
        potential performance thing.
        
        ~brian
      
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