Replying to myself because I figured I'd explain it. On Sun, 1 Jan 2012, Steve Nickolas wrote:
On Sun, 1 Jan 2012, Bill Hicks wrote:Ok so holding down enter when turning it on brings up the same error and then goes to the ML monitor prompt '*'. Pressing CTRL C and enter takes me to the basic prompt ']', but no matter what it type it will beep after I hit enter and go back to the ML prompt. Is this normal? The last time I used an apple 2 was 30 years ago in 10th grade. I used to know a lot about he,, now not as much I appears. Bill HTry Ctrl-B instead. -uso.
The Laser monitor, while very different under the hood from Apple's, uses the same commands as Apple's. On Apple's monitor, Ctrl-C does a "warm restart" of BASIC by jumping to $E003, and Ctrl-B does a "cold restart" by jumping to $E000.
If Applesoft BASIC hasn't had a chance to initialize itself, then when you hit Enter, it tries to execute code that hasn't been placed in memory...and therefore it hits a BRK and crashes back into the monitor. This is why you have to use Ctrl-B.
-uso.