@Stexe

[Carny_Priest]

Stexe, I'm not aware of a way to completely turn off key presses when you use integrated support for TPA. Using integrated support for TPA means that you do want PinballX to navigate the TPA app UI and launch a specific table as a single player game based on the value listed in the grid position tag in your xml. If you do not want this then your best bet is to disable integrated TPA support and use an "additional system" slot with a custom system type to simply launch TPA into the main menu. 

FX2 has some different options. Again, using integrated support means that you do want PinballX to navigate the FX2 UI and launch a specific table as a single player game. But, if you are using the Steam version of FX2, you can launch a specific FX2 table from the command line and bypass the UI entirely. As I recall, if you don't have any grid position tags in your xml then there are no other key presses happening in this scenario. At least, none that I recall impacting the game. Again, this is single player games only. The command line does not support launching hotseat multi-player games. 

[Stexe]

"Just so you know Stexe, if you set a system up as a custom system you can do whatever you want with it and PinballX won't send keypresses. You will however need to code some scripts. What you are asking is certainly possible without a change to PinballX though and without me having to add features.

I am replying here because you said you were a programmer. So you can do what you need without a new feature in PinballX.

EDIT: I see Carny pretty much said the same thing. I just saw that. Reply in that topic if you need help. Thanks. Tom."

Since I can't respond to the other thread because it is closed, I figured I'd respond here. Thanks for the info, I should be able to do that. Do you have any example scripts I can look at? I've already created a few of my own batch files to manually close programs that open with PinballX, but would be curious how the keypresses are sent and what scripts you already use. Would be much easier to see existing scripts and learn from that then completely making them from scratch.

 

[Carny_Priest]

Myself, I don't use any scripts for FX2 and TPA at least not to navigate the app UI. As I mentioned above, for FX2 I use the command line launch feature and have PinballX launch through it's usual launch executable and parameters fields (i.e., PinballX.ini). I don't have any investment in TPA. Open source programs do the same simulation job with higher quality and a much richer feature set. I only keep TPA around to help test the integrated support. Currently, the integrated support is not working entirely correctly for me either. As Farsight keeps meddling with the UI function from release to release, I can see how that saps motivation to keep integrated support current and working in PinballX. It is what it is. Not all users agree that you can live without TPA though.

Scripts here tend to use AutoHotkey as a super-sized extension of Windows bat instructions. A really good example is the defunct NukeLauncher app. It supported the older UI. Actually, it would probably be better to look at NukeFX on the site rather than NukePA because the current TPA UI got rid of its wheel UI and started using a grid UI that is similar to FX2. The source code is not published, but it is not like it can't be very easily viewed in any code editor. It will provide some good ideas how it is done. Looking at it you can decide if it is worth the effort to proceed with your own solution.

http://www.nukelauncher.com/item.asp

 

[Carny_Priest]

Hmmm, I do use a custom system type for FX2. I forgot that I had trouble getting a clean exit with integrated support. Not an issue about key presses. I've attached my script in any case. Aside from killing the process harder, I use the script to launch helper apps to support functions specific to my own hardware configuration. You may not have to worry about launching antimicro (to map a gamepad button to an emulated X-box 360 exit button) OR launching dmdext to flip FX2's virtual DMD for projection on a Pinball 2000-style cabinet. The rest may still be useful to you.

I use AutoHotkey scripts a lot with my cab.

 

LaunchFX2T.ahk.txt