# JoystickButtonEvent

This is the Event subclass that represents joystick button events. There are four joystick button event subtypes:

- joystickbuttondown: Fires when the user presses a joystick button while PinballY is in the foreground. Also fires each time the button "auto-repeats" while the user is holding it down.
- joystickbuttonup: Fires when the user releases a button while the program is in the foreground.
- joystickbuttonbgdown: Fires when the user presses a joystick button while PinballY is in the background (that is, while another application's window is in front and has keyboard focus). Also fires each time the button "auto-repeats" while the program is in the background.
- joystickbuttonbgup: Fires when the user releases a button while the program is in the background.

Joystick button events are always fired on the mainWindow object.

## Properties

This event type has all of the standard event properties and methods (see the Event class), plus the following:

- background: true if the application was in the background when the event occurred, false if not. PinballY processes button presses that occur while it's in the background so that it can monitor "Exit Game" and "Pause Game" commands while a game is running.
- button: A number representing which button on the joystick was pressed. Joystick buttons are usually numbered consecutively from 1 to the number of buttons on the unit, although that may be more of a convention than a rule. The exact button numbering is determined by the joystick's manufacturer, so it's arbitrary and peculiar to each specific joystick make and model. The easiest way to figure out which physical button on a device maps to which number in the software events is to use a joystick viewer (such as the Windows "Set up USB game controller" control panel), pressing each physical button in turn to see which button number lights up in the viewer. The button numbering is generally fixed in the hardware for a given device, so the numbers that light up in the control panel should match the numbers you see reported in PinballY joystick events.
- repeat: true if this is an auto-repeat button event from a button being held down, false if not. (Windows joystick devices don't have a concept of "auto-repeat" the way that keyboards do, but PinballY provides simulated auto-repeat to make joystick buttons more consistent with keyboard behavior, so that pin cab buttons work the same way in PinballY whether wired through a keyboard or joystick encoder device. PinballY uses the system keyboard control panel settings to simulate auto-repeat events for joysticks with the same timing as for keyboard keys.)
- unit: The "logical unit number" of the joystick that generated the event, representing which joystick the button belongs to. If multiple joysticks are attached to the system, this allows the program to distinguish which one generated the event. The logical unit number isn't anything Windows knows about; it's just an internal ID assigned by PinballY to tell joysticks apart.

## Background events

As with keyboard events, the joystick system uses separate event types for button presses that occur when the program is in the foreground and background. The reasons to separate the events are the same as for keyboard events; refer to the key event section for details.