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View Full Version : help,buttons do not work in games


V-iPAQ
12-23-2004, 09:14 AM
I'm quite frankly getting sick of some of these ocket PC problems. Today, my hardware buttons stopped working. They worked perfectly well from the main screen and also from inside applications. But whenever I try to play a game, no matter what game is, none of the buttons other than the cursor would work.

I did a soft reset and ran the game as the first program several times and it didn't help.
reinstalling the game stuff doesn't help. Is it a problem with my machine? And iPaq 4150. The only thing I did this morning was restore from a backup from ActiveSync. :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:

Darius Wey
12-23-2004, 12:48 PM
I'm quite frankly getting sick of some of these ocket PC problems. Today, my hardware buttons stopped working. They worked perfectly well from the main screen and also from inside applications. But whenever I try to play a game, no matter what game is, none of the buttons other than the cursor would work.

What games are you trying to run? Some games actually disable the hardware buttons whilst it is running to avoid the user accidentally pressing one of them thus disrupting gameplay.

V-iPAQ
12-23-2004, 01:20 PM
no. all of them.
It was working, then it wasn't today.
It happened before, but somehow one day it worked again after a few weeks.
:evil:

Darius Wey
12-23-2004, 01:24 PM
How old was the backup file that you restored? The ActiveSync backup feature is far from perfect and doesn't allow any breathing room for customisation of options. You may have altered the registry and some system files in the restoration process, and these can easily amount to problems - one possibility is a mess-up of the hardware buttons.

V-iPAQ
12-23-2004, 01:55 PM
ok............. tried a hard reset and ran the games again (on SD card).
not fixed..................
No idea what's wrong. what survives a hard reset ? do files write themselves or something so that hard resets won't work on them? like a hd volume # that changes each time you format?

V-iPAQ
12-23-2004, 02:14 PM
How old was the backup file that you restored? The ActiveSync backup feature is far from perfect and doesn't allow any breathing room for customisation of options. You may have altered the registry and some system files in the restoration process, and these can easily amount to problems - one possibility is a mess-up of the hardware buttons.
2-3 days ago. I use ActiveSync because it seemd to do a more perfect restore c/f sprite which only adds files but doesn't remove stuff - eg delete leftover \win\ dlls...
But yes, both won't seem to restore the sync state perfectly so that I wouldn't need to 'resolve' all the contacts etc. My old Toshiba used to do so...

Darius Wey
12-23-2004, 02:18 PM
ok............. tried a hard reset and ran the games again (on SD card).
not fixed..................
No idea what's wrong. what survives a hard reset ? do files write themselves or something so that hard resets won't work on them? like a hd volume # that changes each time you format?

The hard reset will wipe everything in your volatile memory, but not the contents of your non-volatile memory or your SD card. Ideally, you should wipe the contents of your SD card and try reinstalling the games again. If that still doesn't work, try installing the games to your main memory. Perhaps the game has a little trouble running off a storage card.

V-iPAQ
12-23-2004, 02:29 PM
yes, I'll try that. but because all of my games suddenly could not detect any buttons, I thought there must be something in the main memory. :idea:
since all my games are on SD card,they couldn't have changed :D and I expected the restore to turn everything to normal. :?: I'll try reinstalling everything tomorrow

Darius Wey
12-23-2004, 02:34 PM
Great! Let us know how it goes. :)

V-iPAQ
12-24-2004, 08:42 AM
man, I cannot believe it :!: I wiped one directoryand reinstalled the game. And guess what, not only does it fix that game, but miraculouslyevery other game decides to work now. They're all on different directories and are from different companies.

Darius Wey
12-24-2004, 09:06 AM
I thought a wipe would fix it up. Good to see everything's up and running again. ;)

V-iPAQ
12-25-2004, 10:53 AM
you may be interested to hear that have done it again. :bad-words: there must be something fundamentally wrong, because this time the backup and restore was done within the same day. And I didn't even go through a hard reset this time :hippy: :silly: :olympic:

this backup thing is totally messed up :huh:

Darius Wey
12-25-2004, 01:47 PM
I'm guessing you've got a buggy backup file that's possibly messing up your registry, and perhaps even your system files to a small extent. Can you work around it and avoid restoring from that particular backup file? That is... just start fresh altogether.

V-iPAQ
12-25-2004, 01:55 PM
well, it's not the file, because I made the file fresh after was back in working order. I think it must be a more fundamental problem :rainbowafro: with either the iPaq ROM itself or the Microsoft ActiveSync :alfdance: crazy thing. :lurking:

Darius Wey
12-25-2004, 02:28 PM
well, it's not the file, because I made the file fresh after was back in working order.

Oh! I was under the impression that this was an old backup file. Have you tried a local backup solution (e.g. Sprite Backup or iPAQ Backup, if you have it). They tend to be more efficient in the whole backup/restoration process.

Just out of interest, what games are these?

V-iPAQ
12-25-2004, 02:37 PM
I have Sprite Backup , but since it doesn't delete files, not very useful for testing new programs which tend to leave stuff behind even when you uninstall them.

The affected games are Worms, Antellion, and SkyForce. One unaffected game is an old free Tetris game some reason. My other games do not use hardware buttons.

Darius Wey
12-25-2004, 02:52 PM
Well, based on messing around with your backups, it seems like the problem is indeed the backup feature of ActiveSync. Usually, it functions fine, but perhaps your device is not liking it at the moment. The selection of games sound fine and I doubt they'd be the cause of anything.

As a general measure for uninstalling programs, you'll find that most do a good job at uninstalling, although they'll usually leave registry keys untouched. If you know how to, you can remove these manually. Also, you may find the odd file or two in Program Files, which you can simply remove (if safe to do so) in File Explorer. Sometimes a program will leave a file in the Windows folder, and it's hard to manually track what has been left behind. Something like MemMaid is good for clearing unwanted stuff on your Pocket PC. There are also third-party uninstalling applications available.

For now, I'd just suggest avoiding the backup feature of ActiveSync and see how events unfold in the next week or two.

V-iPAQ
12-25-2004, 03:06 PM
I do look around in the registry every now and then to get rid of unwanted stuff, but the reason why I do not want to rely on that is because most programs leave lots of crap around.:evil:

for example I have a couple of keys under HKLM\ which obviously do not belong there. Some people throw keys hall over the place whether to prevent the user from seeing them or just through incompetence. I also have a couple of keys under the software section contains a single value which is a string with crap in it. whether this is a buffer overrun or a legitimate key nobody knows. :?: and of course I can't delete stuff that I don't understand