For the entire time I've been using GameEx (a few years), I been using Windows sleep to "turn off" my cab with no ill effects. I'm currently on Windows 8.1. Anyway, after one of the last few GameEx updates I noticed that after a sleep and resume cycle that screen blanking now stops working. Everything else is fine, but I see my desktop whenever I start or stop a game. If I close GameEx and restart it, screen blanking starts working again. I've tried doing a few full restarts of the computer several times but this new behavior persists.
Anyone else seeing this??
[edit 1] An observation. If I alt-tab within the game, I can still see HideOS running in the background even though screen blanking is not working.
[edit 2] Another way to "fix" it (temporarily) is to alt-tab while the GameEx frontend is displayed and to select it (HideOS is not running at this time). A sleep/resume then breaks it again.
[edit 3] edit 2 above reminded me of a similar and long standing issue I've had with Taito Type X games breaking screen blanking as well (i.e. that screen blanking always stops working for all games after playing a Type X game). So on a hunch I tried playing a bit of Raiden IV (which broke screen blanking as expected), but then managed to "fix" it by performing the same alt-tab trick. So this gives me hope that if this issue can be fixed for sleep, maybe it will fix the Type X game issue too.