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Make the reset a gesture rather than a key

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Control, Alt and Delete, which was F12. Two reasons, and the first one is about hardware
rather than about the emulator.

ON REAL HARDWARE THIS IS NOT A KEY AT ALL. A Voyager has a button on the case, and what a
window has instead of a case is a gesture standing in for one. So it must not be a key
software might want - a machine with a keyboard has function keys on it and something will
eventually have a use for F12, which would have meant taking it away again later, from
programs already written to expect it.

And it must not be reachable by accident. Restarting throws away everything in memory, which
is the same data loss Escape was one keypress from causing, arriving by a different door.
Three keys together are not pressed by mistake.

It has meant this since 1981, so it is also the one gesture nobody has to be told the meaning
of - and Delete stays free for software, since the gesture is all three or nothing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
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Anachronaut
2026-08-29 11:09:41 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent f7657081be
commit 0afead00de
2 changed files with 34 additions and 16 deletions
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README.md
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@@ -47,16 +47,21 @@ The suite holds the two to being the same machine rather than taking it on trust
the entire manifest through Voyager as well, with `--headless`, and requires it to satisfy
every recorded result byte for byte.
**F12 is the reset button**, and it is a button on the case rather than a key the machine
can see: nothing sends a function key to the console, so nothing can be surprised by one. It
does exactly what writing to the machine port does - the machine starts the way it started,
which means the boot chain runs again and finds whatever the disk now says to run.
**Control, Alt and Delete is the reset button.** On real hardware it is not a key at all - a
Voyager has a button on the case, and what a window has instead of a case is a gesture. Two
things follow from that. It must not be a key software might want, because a machine with a
keyboard has function keys and something will eventually have a use for them. And it must not
be reachable by accident, because restarting throws away everything in memory and a single
key that does that sits one mistake away from losing work.
It does exactly what writing to the machine port does: the machine starts the way it started,
so the boot chain runs again and finds whatever the disk now says to run.
That is what makes a bare metal program escapable. `Once` puts one in front of the next start
and deletes the request before jumping, so a demo that has taken the whole machine is one
keypress away from the system coming back, without closing the window and opening it again.
It works on a machine that is stuck waiting for a key, too, which is when a reset button
earns its keep.
gesture away from the system coming back, without closing the window and opening it again. It
works on a machine that is stuck waiting for a key, too, which is when a reset button earns
its keep.
**Escape reaches the machine.** Raylib closes a window on Escape unless it is told not to,
and this machine sends Escape to the console like any other key - so a program reading keys