Somewhere around episode 8 of Curious Marc's (and Mike's) Apollo Guidance Computer series (like 7 years ago), I decided to try to understand the system better. I've been writing code to implement the internals (Block II), with help from Frank O'Brien's book and a ton of work by e AGC and explaining how some more obscure components work.

I suspect I have some parts of it wrong, but to better visualize and push my understanding further, I realized that the TUI from my CROSSWOZ multi-vintage CPU interface would be a good way to figure out where I might be going wrong in my understanding of the internals.

So after a couple of weeks of wiring up my old AGC code to the TUI, I have a pretty good way to watch the whole thing run.

There's a TUI DSKY, Rope loader, real-time visualizer of registers and memory locations, built-in help, single step and breakpoint modes, real-time disassembly of running code, and more.

I borrowed a lot of my own code, so it was nice not to have to start the TUI from scratch. The speed is simulated (ish) as it's running on a Mac terminal.

As this is intended entirely for me to understand how the AGC works, zero lines of this were done by an LLM (didn't exist when I started the project anyway).

There's still a lot of work to do. I don't think some of my CPU internals are correct. I should probably start writing tests... (sigh)

And before you ask, I won't be releasing this. This is a learning project for me. A sort of document for myself by implementing a project. Some of it is spaghetti code, and that's fine with me. If you want to be a good engineer, there are no shortcuts. Do. The. Reps.

May 25, 2026 · 12:55 PM UTC

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Replying to @mrdoornbos
BTW, the HP-16C calculator is the only one I know of that can natively do one's complement like the AGG. Set the word size to 15, switch to one's complement, and change to Octal mode. Super useful for understanding the AGC.
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Replying to @mrdoornbos
@mrdoornbos release it anyway. It is sad when such work is lost. You never know who might want to continue or contribute to it, or what kind of suggestions or advice you will get.
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