I was curious to know if it was possible to recode the key to pause a cart during runtime. That is, directly in the source-code itself.

If you go to make a program that asks your name and reads the real keyboard via poke 24365,1, if you hit letter "P" it will pause with an interrupt menu. Is there some way, in code, poke or otherwise, to reconfigure the pause key to something like "ESC" or backwards apostrophe "`" ?

How can this be done ?

Well, I'm not aware of a way to re-map the pause key (aside from the KEYCONFIG command)...

But if you manually handle update/draw loops, you can have another key act as (a) pause key.
Then if you combine that with disabling pause key via POKE(0x5F30, 1), then it should be more or less the same as re-mapping.

Yes, it's a dirty hack, but isn't all of life, eh? ;)

Solved. lockout "P" and when key found you want is, use

extcmd("pause")

.

Be sure and clear keyboard buffer after pause though or keys may "stack up" on you.