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Apollo On Board Computer Emulator
frankk74 writes "For those of you interested in Historical Computing and the Apollo manned spaceflights Ron Burkey has created a open source emulation of the Apollo Guidance Computer called vAGC. I use it as my desktop clock of choice. Note it only keeps mission time so after 24 hours you have reset the time :-). P.S. Another cool Apollo toy free and payware can be found here."
In three two one... Huston, we have a problem.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
A quick inspection of an Apollo capsule reveals why they didn't just use a PDP8.
Think of three fat guys trying to move one of those things in a Mini Cooper.
KFG
...without having a "Start" button? ;)
I tried to use this to run games. It didn't work at first, there just wasn't enough power. Then I used the gravitational pull of my neighbor's house as a slingshot and was running Doom 3 in no time.
Does someone have a copy of that old favourite: "Lunar Lander" which runs on this emulator? :-)
Hell, even my Texas Instruments card-programmable calculator played that game!
And they made Buzz Aldrin sit in the back. No wonder he gets cranky if someone says that he didn't go to the Moon!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Humorous snippet from the landing module code...
...
P63SPOT3 CA BIT6 # IS THE LR ANTENNA IN POSITION 1 YET
EXTEND
RAND CHAN33
EXTEND
BZF P63SPOT4 # BRANCH IF ANTENNA ALREADY IN POSITION 1
CAF CODE500 # ASTRONAUT: PLEASE CRANK THE
TC BANKCALL # SILLY THING AROUND
CADR GOPERF1
TCF GOTOP00H # TERMINATE
TCF P63SPOT3 # PROCEED SEE IF HE'S LYING
P63SPOT4 TC BANKCALL # ENTER INITIALIZE LANDING RADAR
CADR SETPOS1
TC POSTJUMP # OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD
CADR BURNBABY
...the computer reset because it ran our of memory.
That's because when the LM was being designed some engineer decided "640 Bytes should be enough for anyone."
If we have a Beowulf cluster of these, do we have a space invasion on our hands ?
If so: who is invading who ?