Jeff just made me aware of a new Apple II/II+ ROM image that he's been working on called Kiosk Mode. This came about following a discussion with Tony359 on the Applefritter forum :

Tony359 :

Hi all,

I'm trying to find out if there is a way to perform a hard reset on an Apple II+ without having to power cycle the machine. The background is: the machine is on display in a local no-profit computing museum and it would be great if there was an easier way to start another program than reaching at the back for the power switch.

Is there a way to wire something onto the motherboard so when triggered it performs a full reset as if the computer was power cycled? Thank you!

Jeff :

Every Apple II already has the "hardware switch" you're looking for - it's called the Reset switch. While you may need to also hold down the ctrl key, hitting Reset always causes the CPU to execute the reset routine in ROM. Just like powering on the machine.

The culprit preventing you from doing what you want is the Autostart Monitor. This was an improvement to the original F8 Monitor ROM and one of these improvements was the addition of a "soft reset" vector in RAM. This allowed for a warm start function that treated Reset differently after the machine was first powered on. It also allowed programmers to disable the normal action of hitting Reset. Very enticing to commercial (i.e. game) publishers to help prevent copying.

The solution for you would be to create a modified Monitor ROM that always performs a cold reset.

And thus Jeff created the "Kiosk Mode" ROM image for Tony, that forces a cold start when the Reset key is pressed. You can download the Kiosk Mode ROM image from the ROM Images -> ROMX page here. Great work Jeff!