The shell printed "finished" every time a program gave the machine back.
That made sense when starting a program and getting the machine back was
most of what the machine did and the prompt was the only other thing on
the screen. Under a listing, between two commands, it is noise.
And it was printed whatever the program made of it, so a program that had
just explained what went wrong was answered with the word "finished" -
"there is no such directory: nowhere" and then, immediately, "finished".
The prompt coming back is what says a program is over. It is the same
argument osLastStatus is made of: a program that failed has already said
so in words, and anything the shell adds beside that is the shell talking
over it. A program that FAULTED still says so, because the fault screen
printed in red above and a program that is gone should not look like one
that ended.
A NEWLINE ONLY IF ONE IS WANTED. A program that stopped part way along a
line would leave the prompt sitting in the middle of its last output,
which the word used to prevent by accident. The console knows which
column the cursor is in, so the shell asks - where a blank line printed
every time would be right about half of the time, and an empty directory
listed with ls would be followed by a blank line for no reason.
Fifty nine recorded sessions lose the word. Two of them move a cursor up
a row with it, which is the same fact seen from the screen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
0x64 counted only the RECORDED pads. So a controller plugged into Voyager
reported its buttons perfectly, and every game asking whether there was a
controller was told no - which is exactly what Lunar Porter asked, once,
at startup, before falling back to the console for the rest of the run.
The cause is worth naming: a front end calls padSet every frame for every
pad, so "held nothing" is the commonest thing it says and cannot also mean
"there is no pad here". Connected is said separately now. Pad nought is
always there behind a window, because the keyboard is behind it - which is
the useful answer rather than the literal one.
And Pad.asm, which is what should have existed before any of that guessing
began. It prints a line whenever a pad changes, and tells apart the three
states that look identical from inside a game that will not respond: one
nobody noticed, one mapped to nothing, and a mapping that is wrong.
WHY A PROGRAM AND NOT A PRINT IN THE FRONT END: because the question is
what the MACHINE can see. A front end reporting what it thinks it is
sending answers a different question, and the gap between those two is the
whole of this bug.
It also found that osPrintNumber takes A as the HIGH half - the same way
round as the shift register and every other pair here, and not what a byte
in A wants. Every value came out 256 times too big.
Gravity is one frame in ten rather than six. The ratio between thrust and
gravity is the feel; how often the tick comes round is how fast that feel
arrives, and one in six was still touchy. Same lander, more time to think.
And the verdict waits for a key. It printed and left immediately, taking
the screen with it - so the one thing worth seeing, the lander sitting on
the ground it had just reached, was gone before it could be looked at.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5