The keyboard
Sixty-seven mechanical keys across the front of the board. Most of it is exactly what you'd expect — letters type letters, Enter sends the line. This chapter is the rest.
Everything is in capitals
The ACE types in upper case, period. There is no lower case from the keyboard — hold Shift and you get the symbol on a number key, but a letter is a capital either way. Caps Lock is a real key with a real switch under it, and it does nothing at all.
This suits BASIC, which wants its keywords in capitals anyway. Text in quotes is stored exactly as you type it, so PRINT "HELLO" prints HELLO — and there's no way to type Hello at the machine itself.
Lower case does exist
The character set has lower-case letters in it, and anything arriving over the serial port can be mixed case, so a listing pasted in from a laptop keeps whatever case it was written in. The keyboard is the limit here, not BASIC.
Stopping things
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Esc | Stops a running program. This is the one to remember. |
| Ctrl+C | The same thing, for people used to typing it |
| Reset button | Restarts the machine — see below |
Esc is checked between every statement while a program runs, so it works even from inside a tight loop. What you get back is:
BREAK IN 30
OK— the line number it happened to be on. Nothing is lost. LIST still shows your program, and CONT starts it up again from where it stopped.
At the OK prompt, with nothing running, Esc does nothing. That's deliberate: it means you can't accidentally break something while you're just typing a line in.
Editing a line
There's no full-screen editor here. To change line 30, type line 30 again — the new version replaces the old one. To delete it, type 30 on its own and press Enter.
Backspace rubs out the last character while you're still typing a line, before you press Enter.
The reset button
It sits just above Esc, in the top-left corner of the keyboard, where you can find it without looking.
Pressing it restarts the machine — but it doesn't wipe memory. You get the splash screen and the OK prompt back, and your program is still there:
LIST
10 PRINT "STILL HERE"
OKYour variables survive too. This is the button for getting out of anything — a program stuck in machine code, a wedged Monitor session, a machine that has stopped answering.
For a genuinely clean start, switch the power off and on again. That clears memory properly and BASIC comes up from scratch, banner and all.
Neither one saves anything for you. If it matters, SAVE it first — see Storage.
Ctrl and the arrow keys
Holding Ctrl sends a control code instead of a letter: Ctrl+A through Ctrl+Z send codes 1 to 26, and Ctrl+[ sends the same code as Esc. Two of them do something at the prompt today — Ctrl+C breaks, and Ctrl+H is backspace. The rest arrive at your program as ordinary characters, for you to do what you like with.
The arrow keys, Ins and Del each send a code too. BASIC doesn't act on them — there's no cursor movement at the OK prompt — but a program reading the keyboard directly can use them, and that's how you'd build a menu or a game that reads the arrows.
What PRINT CHR$() can and can't do
PRINT CHR$(13) gives you a new line, and CHR$(7) rings the bell. Beyond those, the screen ignores what it's sent: control codes it doesn't recognize are dropped, and so is anything above character 126 — so PRINT CHR$(219) puts nothing on the screen, even though there is a solid block at that position in the character set. Reaching the upper half of the character set means going through the Kernal's raw output routine from assembly.
The character set shows all 256 of them, and which ones PRINT will pass.
📄 Keyboard Layout card — the keys as they sit on the board, and the ones worth remembering. The Keyboard Matrix card has the grid behind them, for anyone wiring their own.