According to the splash page of www.starflt.com, the player should be able to pause at any time.

"All events occur in pauseable real-time, events such as ship combat, lifeforms moving or attacking, or even just time passing only takes place when you are outside of a menu..."

I'm playing Starflight 2, and no amount of fiddling with the menu seems to stop time.

How do you pause?

According to my original SF2 Command Sheet, press the "Pause" Key, which usually near the PrtSc key to pause the game. If you don't have a Pause Key, then hit the Esc Key to pull up the menu and pause the game. Time does not pass while you're in the game menu.

Thanks. This is working planetside but it freezes the game when used in space encounters.

Does anyone have a fix or workaround? Surely all you SFers take advantage of the pause feature.

In the dosbox .conf file, try setting the second entry for priority to "higher,pause". So it would look like this:

priority=higher,pause

This will cause dosbox to pause emulation when the window is unfocused, effectively pausing the game. That's what I do, and I find it quite convenient.

Pause is the correct way to pause the game, but if it's giving you crash issues, here are a few workarounds.

1. I rarely use pause, though I've seen it lock the game up one time when I left it paused for a long time (was probably approaching half an hour). I haven't had any problems when pausing for short times, if you use pause, try not to let it sit for too long.

2. In hyperspace, the best way to "Pause" the game is to simply open your starmap. Time will not pass while in a star map. If you want a long pause, this is the best way.

3. If you're in an encounter, on on planet side, or really anywhere, and you just need to "pause" long enough to gather your thoughts on the next action, then simply keep moving your menu selection up and down while you think. The game is effectively paused as long as you keep moving your menu selection--this is very helpful in things like, combat or planet side when a lifeform is heading your way and you just want a few seconds breathing room to focus on which menu command you actually need to activate. I do this a LOT while playing both SFs, it's really helpful.

4. The above works in every menu *except* the main communications menu where you hail and terminate. However, if you want time to read what an alien just said, before they spew out another message, select Question, but DON'T pick a new question yet--the game pauses inside the Question menu, so that gives you time to finish reading the last response at your leisure.

5. Finally, I may be remembering incorrectly since I never use it, but I believe DOSBox itself has it's own pause feature. I don't remember the key combination, but if you look at DOSBoxe's readme that lists all the keys, it should be there.