I proudly presents: First successful implementation of an Atari 7800 pause mod for 2600 games.

The standard pause key only works on Atari 7800 for 7800 games which honor the key and have special coding. The 2600 games lacks this feature and the key is defined as S/W switch for those games.

With my pause mod the 2600 games stops and of course leaving audio and ugly video artefacts behind as on standard 2600 consoles. that's the reason implementing enhanced features into the mod to switch of audio and video picture (as done by my other mod's as well).

It is a hardware pause mod and from concept works with 7800 mode as well. But it seems the Maria chip do not recognize proper halt of the system and still updating playfield for a while ignoring halt signal, which in 50% of all cases destroys the playfield with incorrect patterns. Sometimes it works quite well so there seems to be an additional condition Maria chips is handling idle periods.

So overall solution is to use the pause key for both modes:
- enhancing existing pause function in 7800 mode to switching off video as well after a while to prevent burn in on current tv sets.
- in 2600 mode (automatically detected) halting system and disconnecting video and audio.
- signal current status by change of LED/backlight color.
- allow to disable the pause mod and enable s/w switch in 2600 mode for compatibility reason.