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Visual Pinball (VPX) -- Pause Function

vpx pause

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#1 whynotpizza

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Posted 28 October 2019 - 07:14 PM

Silly question ... is there an easy way to "pause" game play (interrupted by kids or wife) and then resume?

 

Setting up my wiring for buttons and thought it would be great to have a pause button.



#2 whynotpizza

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Posted 28 October 2019 - 08:50 PM

Ok let me clarify.

 

ESC key pauses, and ESC key un-pauses.

 

But if I am only using Joystick port mappings in Visual Pinball (Keys, Nudge and DOF) settings, there does not appear to be a mapping for ESC key.

 

Do I need to buy a KB to JoyStick device just for this?

 

Any suggestions?



#3 scutters

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Posted 28 October 2019 - 09:23 PM

Pinballx has a pause function that you can map to a button. Not sure on other front ends.



#4 STV

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Posted 29 October 2019 - 05:22 PM

I mapped a button to ESC for a pause ability. 



#5 whynotpizza

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Posted 08 December 2019 - 08:50 PM

I can see this is going to be more difficult than I realized.

 

Seems like "pause" is a white unicorn that can never be found!

 

Using PinballY, VPX 10 (latest), Freezy DMD (latest), PinUPPlayer (latest) ... not everthing "pauses"

 

If I simply open VPX 10 and run a table, clicking ESC causes the window to pause, but not the backglass - i.e. PinUPPlayer still runs.

 

Is it really possible to have a unified "pause" key?

 

Or should I just have the volume button on the PC at the ready all the time?

 

By the way, tried using PinballY's "pause" key mapping and that didn't do anything.



#6 gtxjoe

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Posted 08 December 2019 - 09:28 PM

I think your real choice are to exit the game or finish it

You got as many as 5-6 independent apps running simultaneously

As for volume control, I think you need a keyboard emulator with Windows volume key support

#7 whynotpizza

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Posted 08 December 2019 - 09:43 PM

You may be right, certainly lots going on here all at the same time.

 

One thought is to leverage PinVol with a "mute" key mapping so that the cabinet will go into "quiet mode". But the ball and table still remain in play (at least until you lose a ball!) PinVol rocks by the way.

 

Another thing I just tried is beta16 of PinballY. Turns out a bug in the "pause" function was not working properly in the latest release.

  http://mjrnet.org/pi...sionHistory.txt

 

That said, it works (kind of) but does not pause any game which has PinUPPlayer configured. Only B2S tables work with PinballY pause function. For some reason even though B2S tables work, there is a delay from the time you start a table to the time you can enter into pause mode which is like 30 seconds or so. Weird.

 

So I may just make a "mute" button and call it a day!



#8 whynotpizza

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Posted 10 April 2020 - 02:09 AM

Ok revisited this tonight and got it working quite well.

 

Used joytokey to map joystick button to a specific key, in this case "escape" which is a special key in Visual Pinball as it will immediate pause (and un-pause) the state of a running game.

 

https://joytokey.net/en/

 

Works like a champ!



#9 whynotpizza

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Posted 10 April 2020 - 02:44 AM

Spoke too soon.

 

Works running VPX 

 

Doesn't work running PinballY

 

Gotta be some sort of key mapping overlap ....



#10 KABS

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Posted 10 April 2020 - 04:49 AM

i think it is related to escape key, if you change your pause to a different key it should work. The ball will drain if its not cradled most of the time


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#11 whynotpizza

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Posted 12 April 2020 - 01:48 AM

Good call, thank you.

 

I went back to trying to use PinballY's internal "pause" function and it works now (running later beta release)

 

And using a combination of JoytoKey and PinVol I have setup a single button which pauses the game and drops the volume to night mode...nice! 

 

(thanks)







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