Show HN: Universal Pause Button

https://github.com/ryanries/UniversalPauseButton

by RyanRies • 11 years ago

501 169 11 years ago

RyanRies10• 11 years ago

You can also download the executable (if you don't want to compile it) from https://www.myotherpcisacloud.com/post/universal-pause-butto...

scrollaway• 11 years ago

Really cool. Well done!

Did you try it on Wine yet?

livebeef• 11 years ago

Wine? What about SIGSTOP?

nacs• 11 years ago

You should consider uploading that file to the Github repo in the "Releases" section so people can find it easier.

RyanRies10• 11 years ago

Good idea.

irq-1• 11 years ago

You should not pause explorer.exe

RyanRies10• 11 years ago

Agreed. Learned that the hard way. I have since updated the app with an exclusion specifically for explorer.exe. Later I'll scan the registry and find what the user's shell is, just to cover the rare case that the user has a custom shell.

ohitsdom• 11 years ago

Really clever. What a thoughtful project, too. Hope your SO appreciates the work you put in on it!

Carrok• 11 years ago

I would love this for Mac, not for games but for all browser tabs. Find whichever tab I'm playing music in, and pause it, whether it be SoundCloud, YouTube, or some other streaming something. Fantastic idea though!

jon-wood• 11 years ago

Media Keys does that for Chrome.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/media-keys-by-sway...

ihuman• 11 years ago

At WWDC, they announced that the new Safari version would be able to do something like that.

Artemis2• 11 years ago

That's only muting tabs, which Chrome has been doing for years.

miraks• 11 years ago

And for Firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/be-quiet/

cool-RR• 11 years ago

"I like to play video games. I also have a significant other, and she often walks into the room to talk to me while I'm playing a video game."

Looks like the real solution would be to pause your SO ;)

jerf• 11 years ago

I encountered this problem with babies. They definitely don't pause.

My solution was the DS/3DS line of consoles... snap 'em shut, bam, paused. I've called them the consoles of choice for the discriminating father.

(If you've never had kids and find yourself wondering what horrible father would be playing video games while taking care of his children, well, you see, it turns out that sometimes your child wants to sleep on somebody, and will not sleep any other way... and there's only so many things you can do with a baby that cries if you move sleeping on you. Both of my kids went through that phase for different reasons.)

icesoldier• 11 years ago

My solution was the DS/3DS line of consoles... snap 'em shut, bam, paused.

I'm a fan of this as well - works for PSP and Vita too, just quickly press power and it's in sleep mode. However, I have run into one game that didn't properly pause itself when closed. I think it was Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days. Its cutscenes didn't pause when I closed my DS. Otherwise, yeah, this is the greatest.

ConAntonakos3• 11 years ago

Does the Xbox One not do this? I mean suspend gameplay and resume with just a touch of a button?

bentcorner• 11 years ago

I was able to bottle feed my daughter when she woke up at night and simultaneous play through and finish Braid over the course of a few days/weeks. Through some sort of weird pavlovian conditioning I started looking forward to her waking up in the middle of the night (I restricted my playing to night-time feedings to give myself something to do during those times).

pimlottc• 11 years ago

"Universal Pause Button" my eye, I tried it and the universe just kept going.

anotheryou• 11 years ago

you have to focus the right window, can you do that?

uh and you'd need to find that pause key the dimension above...

steveh73• 11 years ago

No, it worked - you were just paused along with it. (It times out automatically if there is no user input.)

arcatek3• 11 years ago

That's interesting. However, I wonder ... don't you think it can be abused in some games that try to compensate lag? For example, what if they use a code similar to:

  delay = currentFrameTime - lastFrameTime
  playerPosition += direction * delay

I know that some games (such as Diablo III) may automaticallt ban you if you happen to run a program that may be used to cheat (they detect that via a background process check).

RyanRies10• 11 years ago

I have thought about this. In fact I even asked Gabe Newell about whether the use of this program might falsely trigger some anti-cheat mechanism within Steam. (He hasn't replied yet.) So, I guess until I get more official information, please proceed with caution and use at your own risk. That being said, that would imply that using Process Explorer or PsSuspend could also get you banned, since those applications also have the ability to suspend threads.

SCHiM• 11 years ago

Yeah do be very careful with this, many anti-cheat programs are very trigger-happy.

Some time ago I had an application crash on a development machine while I was playing a game. On my dev machine crashes go straight to ollydbg. Next thing I know I'm kicked from the game, and it tells me to stop 'using cheat programs'. Go figure :p

frik4• 11 years ago

He wrote it's useful for singleplay games that have an intro. If you use it in multiplayer games you certainly will simply drop out of the game as you will loose the connection or what you described depending on the server implementation.

kedean• 11 years ago

That doesn't just apply to multiplayer, though. OP said Diablo 3, which is multi OR single player. Many games now use those phone-home anti-cheating measures (or drm measures) even when you aren't actually playing with anyone else.

arcatek3• 11 years ago

Sure, the issue is that even if you don't use it, the simple fact that it is running in the tray may be enough for an anti-cheat to trigger. Just something to keep in mind.

ratsz• 11 years ago

A popular multiplayer cheat is to suspend the network stack somehow for a split second while their team gets into place and resume causing the game's network code to resync and players will teleport into advantageous positions or become extremely difficult to target or hit during key moments. It's very hard to detect especially if the program doing the suspending is on the router and not the system running the actual game.

wmil• 11 years ago

It could be considered an exploit in games like Dark Souls where other players can invade. Just pause the game for a few seconds and their connection will drop.

ifdefdebug• 11 years ago

Indeed some deep nesting here. You made me remember a quickbasic program I wrote for a class back in early 90s, where I packed the whole program in a single do-loop with about 20 indent levels at it's deepest, and I loved it. But... the prof told me to never do that again :( Anyway, thanks a lot for the flashback :)

RyanRies10• 11 years ago

Agreed, it's not the most elegant code, but it's so short and simple I haven't bothered reorganizing the code yet. I probably will start adding features like re-bindable pause key, etc., and I will untangle the mess a bit at that time.

asddubs• 11 years ago

quickest way to do it is to negate your if conditions in the loop something like this:

    if (ForegroundWindow)
    {
        ...
    }
    else
    {
        MessageBox(NULL, L"Unable to detect foreground window!", L"UniversalPauseButton Error", MB_OK | MB_ICONERROR);
    }

becomes

    if (!ForegroundWindow)
    {
        MessageBox(NULL, L"Unable to detect foreground window!", L"UniversalPauseButton Error", MB_OK | MB_ICONERROR);
        break;
    }
    ...

xytop• 11 years ago

I've added a pull request which reduces nesting a bit: https://github.com/ryanries/UniversalPauseButton/pull/2

paradite• 11 years ago

for reference: https://github.com/ryanries/UniversalPauseButton/blob/master...

meritt• 11 years ago

Deep nesting always bugs me too. It's so much cleaner and easier to understand (for me anyway) to identify the else case ahead of time and stop processing immediately.

melvinmt• 11 years ago

http://refactoring.com/catalog/replaceNestedConditionalWithG...

RyanRies10• 11 years ago

Alright, should be pretty much taken care of in version 1.0.1.

frik4• 11 years ago

Great idea, will be helpful.

Now, I only need a similar tool that kills the process with the highest CPU and MEMORY load with a short cut. Reasons: Sometimes a process leaks memory and fills up 16GB RAM and opening a new process like taskmgr is impossible to severe paging-IO. Sometimes a full screen application crash and spawns a modal crash dialog behind the full screen window so only taskmgr and keyboard usage works (as the mouse is hidden by the crashed full screen app).

Hello71• 11 years ago

Magic SysRq-F

arebours• 11 years ago

Wooow, thanks a lot! I'm going to test it now.

Edit: Not working as expected :(

Run python script that allocated a couple of gigabytes of RAM effectively causing my machine to freeze. And OOM killer figured out the best thing it can do is this:

  [2889118.406439] Out of memory: Kill process 11878 (SpotifyHelper) score 302 or sacrifice child
  [2889118.406442] Killed process 11878 (SpotifyHelper)

sjolsen• 11 years ago

If it's a specific program that's doing this, maybe you can wrap it with a script that executes ulimit.

hittudiv• 11 years ago

Always used to watch those cutscenes on youtube! Awesome app btw.

samspot• 11 years ago

This should be a basic requirement for all games. Even before I was married my mom would call or someone would ring the doorbell. And when I was a kid I had to go down to dinner or take out the trash.

CPLX• 11 years ago

That reminds me of the old "Supervisor Key" in classic early games.

jansc• 11 years ago

Yeah! Like the boss key in Leisure Suit Larry: http://www.mobygames.com/game/leisure-suit-larry-goes-lookin... Now THAT is a job ad ;-)

mentat• 11 years ago

"Oh yeah, I was just working on this spreadsheet." Those were the days...

fixermark• 11 years ago

"Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus [http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Mac-Game-Programming-Gurus/dp/1... actually dedicated about a paragraph or two to the topic, driving home the point that a game that cannot be paused is leaving N% of potential players on the table right out of the starting gate (and I believe they even had a hypothetical about "little Jimmy" not being able to pause to take out the trash and therefore his parents uninstall the game).

These days of MMOs and other coordinated time-sinks make me miss the simplicity of pausable single-player and turn-based multiplayer sometimes.

freehunter• 11 years ago

That is probably 90% of the reason I stopped playing multiplayer games. Which sucks because the number of single player games I want to play is, I feel, getting smaller over the years. There was a day when first person shooters, no matter how good the multiplayer was, had a single player campaign as well. There was a day (even when processors were absolute shit) when you could add bots into the game and they would play like humans with personalities.

Hell, even the single player games are getting to be unpausable. How many cut scenes are there in GTAV? And if other duties are at hand, the only option is to skip the story line so you can pause.

madez• 11 years ago

One problem with real-time multiplayer games is also the sensitivity to latency. It can very easily be impossible to play any game that is sensitive to latency together with people from several continents. I'd wish there'd be more games that don't rely on fast connections. CIV 5 is good exception, with it's well though-out multiplayer modes.

baby• 11 years ago

I'm still having nightmares of someone interrupting me during those long and unpausable metal gear solid cutscenes

Cthulhu_2• 11 years ago

MGS 4 is like 50% cutscenes. You can pause them though - thank fuck, the ending cutscenes are over an hour in length or however long it was.

rquirk• 11 years ago

It's why I love the Nintendo DS and its successor the 3DS - any game can be paused just by closing the lid! In this low-power mode it can last for many hours, possibly days.

donatj• 11 years ago

Absolutely days, I close mine and reopen it a week or so later. I never actually turn it off.

derefr2• 11 years ago

Years ago, I wondered why hypervisor-level pause (and memory snapshots, for that matter) weren't just expected features for game consoles.

These days I can at least hit the Home button on a Wii U game and expect it to work. Emulators are still hogging save-states all to themselves, though.

VLM• 11 years ago

This specific example is nice although not truly universal.

An interesting startup idea would be a bluetooth thingy (kinda vague, maybe a necklace?) that when pushed becomes a TRUE universal pause button. Pauses my DVR, my car audio, my linux mythtv box, everything, silences my phone ringer, mutes the TV, shuts off the alarm clock, temp-mutes the smoke alarm if its currently going off, silence the oven timer, car alarm off if its currently sounding, you name it.

Sounds technologically possible although a huge PITA, which sounds like a great startup idea.

You might need to ram thru a whole new bluetooth LE broadcast protocol, maybe. Or just a blind beacon of "anything" thats sniffable (edited: whoops that wouldn't work so well with silenced burglar alarm systems).

I suspect this would sell pretty well once it gets universal...

shabble• 11 years ago

years and years ago I had some thoughts tumbling around about how I'd design an automated system for muting/vibrate-mode only for phones in cinemas/libraries/quiet-zones, etc.

The security implications and UX involved in managing settings in a non-infuriating fashion rapidly sunk it though, and I daresay it would never have been practically deployable unless business/landowners/whatever could enforce its use as a condition of entry.

Also, you forgot the hollow tooth + airbag components + RF magic => remote operated ball-gag :P

savanaly• 11 years ago

Now if only there was a Universal Skip Button for those games with unskippable credits, intros or cutscenes!

ars5• 11 years ago

This actually is sort of possible, you have to mess with the system clock as seen by the program, to make it think much more time has passed than really passed. It will run those scenes at hyperspeed.

Then give back the time later (if you need the clock to match the real clock) when it's waiting for input.

cheepin• 11 years ago

There was a program called cheat engine that let you drag a slider for program speed, as well as generally dig around RAM.

frik4• 11 years ago

One can usually just rename/delete the intro videos (*.bik) or replace them with 1s bik video file or add a commandline flag to the desktop link or a setting in the config text file. But, an universal fixing app that has some heuristics would be more convenient.

voltagex_• 11 years ago

If there is, PCGamingWiki will generally have it.

e.g http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Remember_Me#Skip_intro_videos

seba_dos1• 11 years ago

aka "Windows users discover our CTRL+Z" :) Been doing that very often during Ludum Dare where the best games have usually very fine gameplay and very poor everything else, like lack of pause or progress save - surely came handy.

scandinavian2• 11 years ago

"I've already gotten great value out of the program, as there are lots of cut scenes in The Witcher 3, that I don't want to skip."

The Witcher 3 pauses cutscenes when the window is not in focus. So the example is probably not the greatest.

ConAntonakos3• 11 years ago

I can confirm this as well. If you simply switch to another window or application, away from the game, it'll pause the cutscene.

bjt• 11 years ago

So then every time his wife walks in to ask a question, he immediately Alt-Tabs to another window, and she thinks he's watching porn all the time.

scandinavian2• 11 years ago

Well, I run fullscreen windowed, so something on one of my other two screens just take the focus. The game is still visible and is just paused.

unoti• 11 years ago

My son has been playing Witcher 3 for the last few weeks, and literally every time I walk by, there's a cutscene. I'm pretty sure I have yet to see anything but cutscenes. It's all cutscenes. Listening to it in the background, it sounds more like an episode of Sons of Anarchy than a traditional videogame.

etcet• 11 years ago

The script is apparently ~450,000 words! I have 28 hours of playtime but the game only shows me at 17% completion - its massive and detailed open world is stunning.

tomkinstinch• 11 years ago

This is nice! On OSX, processes can be paused and continued too (by name via killall, and by PID via kill):

  kill -STOP 1234
  kill -CONT 1234

  killall -STOP -c "Pandora"
  killall -CONT -c "Pandora"

A more nuanced control is to throttle down the CPU, via cputhrottle[1].

If I'm running a CPU-intensive calculation and don't want to bog down the rest of my system I will use it to give me enough cycles for Sublime Text to work smoothly.

It's easy to call:

  sudo cputhrottle PID cpuUsage%

ex.

  sudo cputhrottle 12345 400

1. http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html

archagon• 11 years ago

I actually wrote a little GUI app to do this for me a while back! It works but the UI is a bit broken. Maybe somebody will find it useful.

https://github.com/archagon/app-pauser

ars5• 11 years ago

On debian the program is cpulimit.

jokr0042• 11 years ago

The kill -STOP command works on linux too

leni536• 11 years ago

I think using nice or renice is better practice. Hard throttling is way more inefficient.

vezzy-fnord2• 11 years ago

SIGSTOP and SIGCONT are generic Unix signals.

Where it gets more interesting is using elaborate checkpoint/restore [1] mechanisms for processes to serialize their state (open fds, watches, IPC, etc.) into an image that can then be overlayed, remotely executed, debugged and so forth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_checkpointing

derefr2• 11 years ago

I've always thought this was a wrongheaded solution.

I mean, of course, we have these apps that splay themselves all over global system resources in complex ways, and so we need to track down how they've done that, record it, and then replay it later to restore them. It's necessary.

But imagine a well-behaved classical X11 app, running in something like a VM or Docker container. You execute its launcher, the VM spins up in the background, the app launches in the VM, and the app's X11 client connects to the X11 server you're staring at and displays things.

If we truly want to sandbox apps, wouldn't it make more sense to move more toward a model like that—one where you have a discrete "application backend process" running in a sandbox, and you can just chuck around the sandbox itself willy-nilly (freezing it, thawing it, copying it, etc.) because it has well-defined connection-points to the host?

rsync• 11 years ago

"This is nice! On OSX, processes can be paused and continued too"

Every once in a while I am reminded how wonderful, and perhaps unlikely, it is that I have a nice, slick, mass market consumer device (apple computer running OS X) that is honest to god UNIX underneath.

And then sad, knowing that this is a brief golden age that will probably pass.

arthurcolle• 11 years ago

Don't say that... why would Apple change the underlyings of OS X? Blasphemy :(

bbcbasic• 11 years ago

Don't worry. Linux is slicker.

cookiecaper• 11 years ago

Many would argue the golden age of OS X and nix compatibility has already passed. The last time I seriously used OS X was 10.4, but every release I hear about another set of nix compatibilities getting chipped away.

Dewie32• 11 years ago

New operating systems today tend to be just ways of reimplementing Unix. If they have a novel architecture -- and some do -- the first thing to build is the Unix emulation layer.
How can operating systems research be relevant when the resulting operating systems are all indistinguishable?
There was a claim in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Unix had killed operating systems research because no one would try anything else. At the time, I didn’t believe it. Today, I grudgingly accept that the claim may be true (Microsoft notwithstanding).
A victim of its own success: portability led to ubiquity. That meant architecture didn’t matter, so now there’s only one. Linux is the hot new thing... but it’s just another Unix.

http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf

dx2112• 11 years ago

OK, PowerShell magic time:

  calc
  $a = Get-Process calc
  $a.ProcessorAffinity = 1
  $a.PriorityClass = "Idle"
  $b = [Diagnostics.Process]::Start("PowerShell", "-c while (1) {}")
  $b.ProcessorAffinity = 1

Ta-da!

iwalton3• 11 years ago

Here is a quick clone of this project for Linux using the STOP and CONT signals:

  #!/bin/bash
  
  currentProcess=$(xprop -id $(xprop -root | grep -F '_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW(WINDOW)' | awk '{print $5}') | grep -F '_NET_WM_PID(CARDINAL)' | awk '{print $3}')
  
  state=$(grep 'State:' /proc/$currentProcess/status | awk '{print $2}')
  
  if [[ "$state" == "T" ]]
  then
      kill -CONT $currentProcess
  else
      kill -STOP $currentProcess
  fi

Drdrdrq• 11 years ago

I love this!!! The pause button was incredibly useful when trying to figure out what went wrong with DOS boot sequence. I wonder if it would be possible to include support for it in Linux kernel? Sometimes I would like to read those messages that fly over the screen (no, dmesg is not enough)...

simias2• 11 years ago

This program doesn't pause the kernel, just the game's process. Other people in this thread have given equivalent solutions for un*x.

If you want to actually pause the linux kernel you'll have to use something like the magic SysRq: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

Alternatively you can run the operating system in an emulator like qemu.

simoncion• 11 years ago

Why isn't dmesg (combined with syslog to catch messages from daemon startup) enough? I've dramatically increased the size of the kernel ring buffer (so it -in practice- doesn't evict any message) and done ...something... -I can't remember what- to push early dmesg output into syslog.

snorkel• 11 years ago

Wow, coded like a simple old school Win32 API win app, I didn't realize that was still possible in modern Visual Bloatio. Nicely done.

RyanRies10• 11 years ago

My favorite kind of application. Small, lean, close to the metal, and built like a brick house. :)

neutralino1• 11 years ago

Can we pause the significant other too?

miket• 11 years ago

Would love to have this for email.

jdlyga• 11 years ago

It even pauses video studio! It really is universal.

frik4• 11 years ago

Win10Phone/Android/iOS apps are suspended and restored the same ways too. Only the visible app (and some system processes) is running in iOS1-8 (in iOS9 iPadAir2 two apps). It's usually unused in desktop OS (except for universal apps in Win10).

kozukumi• 11 years ago

Nice idea and app. Having a quick look at the code I had forgotten how much work needed to be done for old-skool Windows applications. They do give you great lean applications though which is something I miss.

I will always have a soft spot for small, lean single function applications. I guess it takes me back to my UNIX days. Some of my favourite more modern programs are SumatraPDF, uTorrent (the older 2.x versions) and Notepad2, lovely single exe programs that are self-contained. No installers and messy configs all over the place or in the registry.

tehwalrus3• 11 years ago

Sumatra PDF is the best. I actually prefer it, running under wine, to any of the Linux PDF readers I've tried. I used I to write/preview my thesis.

veli_joza• 11 years ago

Did you try Foxit reader? They actually have a Linux build that is not as feature-full as other releases, but still better than any native Linux PDF reader.

alexweber• 11 years ago

Transmission is a great replacement for uTorrent IMHO

lettergram• 11 years ago

Without reading the explanation, immediately my roommate and I figure out how to do it via the linux terminal by pausing the main thread. It seems so obvious, don't know why I wasn't doing this myself.... since I have the same problem as the OP.

kpennell• 11 years ago

test comment!!

ubercow13• 11 years ago

You can do this to any process in Windows' Resource Monitor too - the one you can open from task manager. On the CPU tab you can right click any process and suspend it.

rip747• 11 years ago

not seeing this in Windows 7. Is this specific to Windows 8 and above?

amadeusw• 11 years ago

From Task Manager, open Resource Monitor. That's the one with green charts on the right hand side. It has different context menu than the Task Manager. Picture (on windows 8): http://thewindowsclub.thewindowsclubco.netdna-cdn.com/wp-con... I'm not sure if Windows 7 has it, though.

mattbgates• 11 years ago

Damn, I thought this was for real life.. could've used one of those. Better than hitting snooze 10 times.

72deluxe• 11 years ago

On OSX you can use Activity Monitor to use View > Send Signal To Process....

amelius2• 11 years ago

But what if the process uses a timer to update an animation? (I.e., the state of the timer determines the frame in the animation).

In that case, after unpausing, the animation would just skip ahead.

As a remedy, the pause button could also stop the system clock as seen by the process.

RyanRies10• 11 years ago

Yep, different applications are guaranteed to react differently to this, depending on how they were written. And a lot of games use the _rdtsc intrinsic straight from the CPU... I can't pause that. :)

amelius2• 11 years ago

You could write a virtual machine that compiles all code into essentially the same code except for the rdtsc instruction (basic-block analysis).

That is a lot of work, but I wonder if there are no debugging or reverse-engineering tools that work in that way.

janinge• 11 years ago

Having a modernized pause/break key on your keyboard can also be handy if you ever have to use software that acts stupid on purpose, like these "Safe Exam LockDown Browsers" that some schools and universities around here have started forcing upon their students. Software like this typically just run a timer or similar to make sure that only their windows are running in the foreground, but sending them a SIGSTOP stops this annoyance.

Dewie32• 11 years ago

It wasn't until MGS4 before the Metal Gear Solid franchise got cutscenes which you could pause. Which was sorely needed because of how story driven the series is, and how long some of the cutscenes are -- I think the end of MGS4 was something like 1 hour, 30 min.

NamTaf• 11 years ago

Great app but I have one request. Can you please modify it so instead of pausing the game until my SO is done talking, it pauses my SO until my game is done its cutscene? Thanks in advance.

JetSpiegel• 11 years ago

Ah, I didn't know Adam Sandler posted on Hacker News.

scotty79• 11 years ago

Try this: http://placebobutton.com/ It was featured on HN recently.

murbard2• 11 years ago

For a fraction of a second, part of me really hoped it could somehow be a pause button for life itself.

kilolima• 11 years ago

Wouldn't it be easier if your girlfriend would not expect that she can walk in and interrupt you any time she wants?

RyanRies10• 11 years ago

Well, maybe. But then maybe I wouldn't have a girlfriend. And more importantly, maybe I wouldn't be reminded that sometimes it's OK to peel myself away from a video game.

deevus• 11 years ago

@OP

I've added this to the scoop-extras bucket for Scoop[0]. So users with the extras bucket can install it using:

  scoop install universalpausebutton

EDIT: Do you have a licence?

[0] http://scoop.sh

RyanRies10• 11 years ago

Thank you! Added MIT license.

est• 11 years ago

Reminds me of old utility which could resize any DirectX based game and force them run in windowed mode.

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