weird but why?

[Jinks]

Ok was playing double dragon. Start game girl is punched and I hit pause when the door was opening to the garage. The door finishes opening then it stays open and then pauses. I unpause and then the door opening sound is heard. So even tho I pause the game the screen continues to be drawn with the door continuing to be opened? Cause the ram keeps it going? Just wondering??

Edited February 3, 2014 by Jinks

[Trebor]

http://pdf.textfiles.com/technical/7800_standards.pdf

 

Supposedly video is frozen and audio should turn off when pause is enabled.

It behaves the same way you described under MESS as well.

Would love to know the answer to your questions too.

[+Gemintronic]

It sounds like the 7800 pause button was software controlled. The PDF above makes it sound like it was providing guidelines to expected behaviour.

 

If my hypothesis is correct Double Dragon doesn't quite stop every sub-system from doing stuff. I don't know enough about assembly or 7800 debugging in general to figure out exactly what's goin' on.

[RevEng]

Hypothesis confirmed. The 7800 pause is just a soft switch (in fact, the same soft-switch/register-bit as Color/B+W on the 2600) and its up to the game program to do the right thing with it.

[LidLikesIntellivision]

What would an Atari 2600 pause kit do with 7800 games?

 

Atari 2600 pause project.

[+FujiSkunk]

What would an Atari 2600 pause kit do with 7800 games?

 

Atari 2600 pause project.

My guess is not much useful. This pause kit ties to the 6507 CPU and the TIA audio/video chip. 7800 games rely on the TIA for audio, but use different hardware for CPU and video. So the only affect on 7800 games would be the disruption of the TIA's activity. I figure it would either silence the audio or crash the game outright, depending on how much the rest of the code and hardware relies on the TIA behaving properly.