[MiNT] FreeMiNT initial key stuck

[Vincent Rivière <vincent.riviere@freesbee.fr>]

Hello.

You certainly experienced that. You start FreeMiNT on your favorite machine 
(or emulator). You run some software requiring the keyboard, but when you 
type something, a bad character is typed several times instead. This problem 
starts when booting FreeMiNT, and never stop. To get rid of this bug, you 
have to reboot and hope this will not happen again.

I recently made a minimal ARAnyM setup, in order to test the kernel and MiNT 
software in the simplest environment. It boots the FreeMiNT kernel then run 
bash on the console. With this setup, I restart ARAnyM a lot of times. And 
maybe 30% of the time (if not 50%) I get this bug. It is extremely annoying, 
so decided to do anything to fix it definitely.

This bug is caused neither by EmuTOS, neither by ARAnyM. I made a lot of 
tests, and Helmut managed to reproduce it on his TT.

Basically, here is what happens. If a key is hold at the beginning of 
FreeMiNT startup, the bug is triggered. Then, in any MiNT application, if 
you type any key, _the initial key_ hold at MiNT startup is repeated several 
times.

In standard MiNT setups, this can happen from EmuTOS welcome screen if you 
hold a key too long.
I made a detailed description here:
http://srv1.trusted.cz:4433/pipermail/cz-bobek-lists-aranym-user/2009-September/004336.html

Then Helmut proposed another simple procedure:
http://srv1.trusted.cz:4433/pipermail/cz-bobek-lists-aranym-user/2009-September/004398.html
Basically, it requires going into the MiNT boot menu and exit by holding the 
Return key 2 or 3 seconds.

So it seems the bug is triggered just after the MiNT boot menu, if a key is 
hold down at that time.

I really hope we will be able to find the cause of this bug and fix it.

NB: Alan, this happens with your FreeMiNT-enhancements kernel, too.

--
Vincent Rivière