Shutdown (user) problems

[leegethas]

Hi,

First of all, thank you for PinballX! It's awesome and I love it.

I placed my cabinet in the canteen of the company I work. And some of my co-workers really like to play it, which is nice. We even build a website to compare our scores with a company closeby, who also have a cabinet in their canteen. However, I do have a small user issue. Hopefully PinballX could provide a solution.

Some of the users tend to simply push the powerbutton and walk away when they're done playing pinball. This causes Windows to close all running programs and shutdown the cabinet. Although no harm is done this way (as far as I know) this kind of behaviour bugs me to no end. First of all, I simply don't like Visual Pinball and PinballX being abruptly terminated like that. And second, when closing the table and closing PinballX, several scripts are executed to upload scores and make backups. These scripts will not be executed when people push the power-button and walk away.

I repeatedly asked users to not do this. But they keep doing it anyway. The main argument is that they do not have the patience to way several seconds for a table to close and shutdown PinballX the correct way. This might sound a bit stubborn, but it is what it is. People do it and I can't police the cabinet all the time.

I have been thinking about disableing the powerbutton altogether. But this will probably result in users pressing the power-button for 6 seconds, until the entire cabinet shuts down. And that WILL do harm. So, I decided not to do that.

So, my hope is that a future release of PinballX will include a feature to intercept the power-button being pushed and automatically shutdown everything the proper way.

Than there is the complete opposite type of user. The one that doesn't shutdown the cabinet at all. In the worst case, it keeps running all weekend. Or the cleaning lady simply janks out the powercord. Both scenario's are not good.

Maybe a future release of PinballX could include a feature to shutdown automatically at certain times. Or after a certain idle time? Or a combination of both?

Thanks!

[CharlesLam]

unplug the connector to the power button from the motherboard to the power button. personally i would enable some sort of sleep enabling so it goes into a hibernation mode for the problem you are having. even if the power gets disconnected you might be able to wake it out of sleep without issues. but it will appear off to the cleaning lady so no need to unplug it.

[Draco1962]

Or maybe an electric fence near the power strip... zzzapp! She won't touch it again!

[Tom Speirs]

Please try the attached. This should make PinballX close gracefully when in launch table state. It won't close VP/Emulators through.

PinballX.zip

[leegethas]

First of all, sorry for the late respond...

And second of all, thank you for your reply. I will try to test your patch later today.

One question though. How does PinballX close gracefully, if Visual Pinball is not closed? Isn't it possible to send the signal (esc) that makes PinballX close the table, and wait for PinballX to return to the homescreen, before closing PinballX itself?

[Tom Speirs]

When the shutdown is triggered in windows - It sends close window messages to all apps. PinballX now responds to this and will exit whereas previously it wouldn't.

I can look into it further once you have tested.