Emulator

I don't think power management is disabled in the Windows build either.

FYI, I've confirmed that screen savers are indeed not disabled either on Linux.

I found a possibly easy solution. I did some digging into how various media players disable screensavers and and power management and found the Xine and VLC have both switched to using xdg-screensaver to handle it rather than their own code. xdg-screensaver is part of the xdg-utils package, which includes utilities for handling various desktop and window management functions through a common interface.

The rationale, of course, is to leverage another utility specifically written for this purpose rather than trying to custom write and maintain a solution yourself. Based on some brief research this doesn't seem to be a perfect solution - there are some edge cases where xdg-screensaver doesn't work, as well as some bugs in the program that have been fixed only in CVS - but it looks like it should handle the majority usage scenarios just fine, and should be relatively easy to implement.

I tested this on my own system by manually running "xdg-screensaver suspend 0x02e00154" (the Dolphin WindowID) while playing a game, and it did indeed temporarily disable both my screensaver and power management settings.

For anyone interested in looking into this, here's some info about the utility:
http://portland.freedesktop.org/xdg-utils-1.0/xdg-screensaver.html

and here's how VLC uses it:
http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=blob;f=modules/misc/inhibit/xdg.c;h=01decacc9a5799a174529197949f41aaf003b6bf;hb=HEAD

I vote for this bug :)

It's real annoying to have the power management stuff kick in in the middle of the action, and it's more annoying that you have to disable it before gaming... just to forget re-enabling it once you exit.

The xdg-screensaver is a neat trick too, and since even my ancient FC6 has it, it would be nice to have it implemented. In the meanwhile, we could survive with some shell-fu magic.

This issue happens for me with the last Dolphin (built from the master branch). I use it with KDE on ArchLinux. After a few minutes, when the power management is on, it dims the screen then shuts it off.