Hey guys. I've been getting into TA lately, and starting slowly by playing some Battle Tactics missions and a few skirmishes. Though something is puzzling me. When I look through the controls, I see "PAUSE = pauses the game". Now, I thought that TAB or F2 were the pause buttons, because the menu is brought up.

How exactly can you pause without bringing up the menu options, and I know you can, because every mission that begins starts off paused. I have to press TAB twice to get it unpaused. Is there some sort of Pause command or something, or can it be bound to a key?

And if it can, how can I bind it? Any assistance is greatly appreciated, fellow GOGers.

And before I end this, lemme just say that I'm enjoying TA so far. Never was much for RTS's, but this is somehow right up my ally.

I don't have TA installed here, so I can't check to be sure.
But doesn't the Pause button on you keyboard (next to scroll lock and printscreen) work for that?

I seem to remember using it on TA, TA:k and the supreme commander series.

Sorry if I'm wrong.

Sorry, perhaps I should've mentioned. I'm playing TA on my laptop. My keyboard doesn't have a pause button, nor a scroll lock button, but just print screen. But even with that, I never even saw a keyboard that had a pause button. Not one.

That's why I'm wondering, can you bind the pause button to another key? Or is that even possible?

It IS the Pause / Break key. If you simply need to stop the game for a bathroom break or what have you, you can use F2 to bring up the Options menu and pause the action; you can't give unit orders while the Options menu is open. If you want to pause the game to stop time while placing orders, then you'll need to find the Pause key (on some laptops, it might be enabled using the Fn key). Alternatively, you could try using the (-) key to slow time to -9, which is pretty durn slow and seems to be the next best thing to an actual pause.

Pages 40 and 41 in the manual discuss hotkeys.

Edit: sorry, no help on bindings.

That's strange, because most, if not all, full-layout keyboards have a Pause/Break key. Hell, I've got one on my lappy (which, admittedly, is widescreen). Anyway, I'm not aware of how to change the keybinds in TA, though you could try testing the F# keys (and Fn + F#) and see what happens. You might get lucky.

Edit: Whoops, too slow. ^_^

Well, I found something.

http://www.neox.net/w/2008/02/13/keyboard-remap-pause-break-key-as-del-key/

I tried using Smartkeys on its own but it appears this is not enough to handle Pause. Figures, Pause is some special exception. After farting around a bit the only thing I managed to accomplish was to take away my Pause key functionality. Whoops. I think I'm on the right track but am screwing something up.

Edit: D'oh, I think I was doing it backwards. I'm trying to map the Pause key function over to the Insert key since I never use that one, but the example on the site shows I was turning my Pause key into Insert. Back to the Registry...

Edit 2: Success! Yup, I had it backwards. Smartkeys isn't exactly clear on this. When looking at the columns "From" and "To", you're taking the key in the From column and making it function as the key shown in the To column. I was thinking the other way around, moving functionality "from" this key "to" that one.

I don't have a good way to describe how to do it. If you go to the page I linked earlier, it talks about the Smartkeys program, and also dinking around manually within the Registry to make the changes, and that's exactly what I had to do. Smartkeys allows you to easily make the binding between E0_46 and whatever other key you want. What it won't do is the E1_1D setting - that one you gotta do by hand.

On that page, it tells you where to go in the Registry to find the specific entry, called "Scancode Map". I then manually edited it (right-click -> Modify Binary Data) so my binary entry reads:

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 1D E1 52 E0 46 E0 52 E0 00 00 00 00

Again, this is to move the Pause key function over to the Insert key. Note that the Pause key still worked in the game, alongside Insert, since I didn't bother to turn it off. No biggie since I don't recall any games using Insert, nor any office apps using Pause. I think if you want to do the same thing I did with Pause and Insert, then you can just copy over that string of garbage written above to the Scancode Map entry in your Registry. If you do it that way, manually, you don't need to bother dl'ing Smartkeys.


Edit 3: Sorry - forgot to mention, this changes the binding of the key for EVERYTHING in Windows, not just this one game. Be sure to pick a victim / donor key that you won't mind possibly messing up. That's why I chose Insert instead of something more useful to me.

So, all right. After a bit of poking around, my laptop model ( a Dell Inspiron w/ Vista) and models just like it don't even HAVE a pause/break key to begin with! No clue as to why Dell omitted that key in the first place...

Plus, my old PC junker (a Dell Dimension) with a 10 year old keyboard actually DOES have a pause/break key. Talk about being oblivious to your own keyboard that you typed on for a good decade. =p

Your help's been much appreciated so far, my friends. I'm still scouring about for ways to remap my keyboard without really having to dig in the registry, as I really don't want to screw anything up (the only time I did fool around their was so I can read the text in Freespace 1+2).

So, any other suggestions while I'm scouring? Keep 'em coming please, something's bound to work...

That Registry change is the only way I found of making it work, because it's, well, it's the Pause key and the keyboard protocols apparently are a bit different just for that one key. One nice thing about Smartkeys is that if you do make the manual change in the Registry (even though you can't perform the entire change with that software), it will show up in Smartkeys and you can then delete the changes there if things get screwed up (if you type in the binary data as I showed, Smartkeys will show two entries).

I'm no registry wiz, either, and found it to be pretty easy to go in and make my experimental adjustments, especially since you only need to change one entry. Just remember that you have to log out or reboot in order to test your changes.