I want to use point and click adventure games to help me study a foreign language. Being a beginner I need to take my time with each sentence. Unfortunatelly none of the games I bought offer a pause functionality in the middle of a dialog or cutscene.
Is there a way to pause/freeze a program on Windows preferably using a shortcut?
You could try running the program in a virtual machine (VM). Most VM management software allows you to pause a running VM.
Alternatively, your program might also pause automatically when it loses focus, so running it in window mode, then switching to another program might help as well.
I will leave the accepted answer intact but I would like to share what I ultimately did.
The VM approach didn't work well, the pausing was hard to bind to a shortcut and was slow.
I also tried to write a process suspension script which looked like a promising solution. But it was really slow and half the time the process didn't even come up.
My final solution was to simply use the print screen key and referencing the dialog screenshots after the characters stopped talking.