To the Moon in "Orbiter"

[Herb Schaltegger]

Reading (and participating a bit) in the "To the Moon on a Pocket
Calculator" thread and looking at the Orbiter site for the first time in
awhile, I see where some uber-geeks are recreating the Apollo flight
computer systems as an add-on of sorts for historical simulation. One
guy's even managed to track down the printed source code for the LM and
CSM computer systems from an MIT database. Apparently he's tried
OCR'ing the .pdf files but as the files are essentially images of poorly
photocopied pages his error rate was >90%.

Here's the thread from the Orbiter discussion boards if anyone else is
interested in their efforts:

<http://orbit.m6.net/v2/read.asp?id=9621>

As an aside, the poster mentioned that scanning through the code he
found a reference to a section entitled "Pinball Game Buttons and
Lights" which he thinks is either a joke or the first computer "Easter
Egg" in spaceflight. (Probably just a coder's joke name, of course!).

--
Herb Schaltegger, Esq.
Chief Counsel, Human O-Ring Society
"I was promised flying cars! Where are the flying cars?!"
~ Avery Brooks

[JD]

Thus spake Herb Schaltegger > on
Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:48:18 -0500, as he held forth on "To the Moon
in "Orbiter""

>Reading (and participating a bit) in the "To the Moon on a Pocket
>Calculator" thread and looking at the Orbiter site for the first time in
>awhile, I see where some uber-geeks are recreating the Apollo flight
>computer systems as an add-on of sorts for historical simulation.

Hey, don't knock it. Reading the history books is one thing, but
not being a rocket scientist to start with, I've gained a deeper
appreciation for the processes and technology which got us there
by using Orbiter to simulate the Apollo missions. It's pretty
amazing (to me at least) how well this thing does with the
historical time lines... hitting the numbers right on the head (or
near enough) when plugging actual mission data into the flight
plan.

For an example of what an Orbiter simulated Apollo mission looks
and feels like, have a look at this tutorial web page...

http://www.jdkbph.com/ALMT

Be gentle though with any factual errors you may see there... <g>

Next up on the schedule is a complete rendition of the Command
Module and Lunar Module panels where every switch, button, knob,
gauge and dial is functional and all of the major systems and
subsystems are modeled. To see what this will look like, take a
look here...

http://www.geocities.jp/rabiddogs_p64/csm.html

and here...

http://www.geocities.jp/rabiddogs_p64/lem.html

[Herb Schaltegger]

In article >,
JD > wrote:

> Thus spake Herb Schaltegger > on
> Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:48:18 -0500, as he held forth on "To the Moon
> in "Orbiter""

> Hey, don't knock it. Reading the history books is one thing, but
> not being a rocket scientist to start with, I've gained a deeper
> appreciation for the processes and technology which got us there
> by using Orbiter to simulate the Apollo missions. It's pretty
> amazing (to me at least) how well this thing does with the
> historical time lines... hitting the numbers right on the head (or
> near enough) when plugging actual mission data into the flight
> plan.

I wasn't knocking it at all! In fact, I'm inspired to download the most
recent build and give it a whirl again. The only problem I've got right
now is that my XP Pro box at home (which had been faithfully running XP
Pro since RC2 in July 2001 suddenly decided to barf three weeks ago and
now will not run without locking up hard (not even a BSOD!) after about
3 - 10 minutes, period. Doesn't matter what I'm doing.

I tried reinstalling (w/o formatting) but no joy. Same symptoms. Leads
me to think it must be hardware but I've added nothing new and the box
runs Linux fine 24/7. Except for a power flicker during a storm last
week I've been up in Linux for over three weeks straight now with nary a
hiccup. I guess I ought to consider completely reformatting and
reinstalling but I really hate to do that - so many critical updates and
SP1 and DX 9 to reinstall . . . *sigh*.

The sad thing is that before XP decided to take a powder on me, it had
been the most stable platform I could need (well, except for my
occasional forays with leaked Nvidia drivers, that is . . . ;-) Not as
stable as my Linux boxes (or my BSD-based OS X iBook either) but the
applications more than made up for the occasional hiccup.


> For an example of what an Orbiter simulated Apollo mission looks
> and feels like, have a look at this tutorial web page...
>

I've seen lots of screenshots, trust me. I even saw one today of a
pseudo-Soviet N1-launched landing on the dark side. Fun stuff ;-) I
hope when/if Dr. Martin gets too bored or tired or otherwise occupied to
maintain it he'll GPL the code so it can be ported to other platforms.

--
Herb Schaltegger, Esq.
Chief Counsel, Human O-Ring Society
"I was promised flying cars! Where are the flying cars?!"
~ Avery Brooks

[Herb Schaltegger]

In article >,
JD > wrote:

> Thus spake Herb Schaltegger > on
> Thu, 31 Jul 2003 17:49:29 -0500, as he held forth on "Re: To the
> Moon in "Orbiter""
>
> >The only problem I've got right
> >now is that my XP Pro box at home (which had been faithfully running XP
> >Pro since RC2 in July 2001 suddenly decided to barf three weeks ago and
> >now will not run without locking up hard (not even a BSOD!) after about
> >3 - 10 minutes, period.
>
> Not inconsistent with a flaky power supply...
>
> XP and they type of apps you might be running on that platform
> could easily be trying to pull more power than your Linux
> instance, which might explain why one works and the other doesn't.
>
> JD

Yeah, my thought at first, too. I ran a diagnostic utility to check the
p/s over time and while there WERE some variations, they were fairly
small and didn't bother Linux at all, even when running very
processor-intensive OpenGL demos and such. So after the recent Orbiter
discussions, I got inspired last night to look into matters further. I
booted into XP and the first thing I did was kill pretty much everything
I could safely kill in the Task Manager. I then deleted the Nvidia
drivers and setup things to run as generic VGA (a real shame to do that
to a GeForce4 4400 w/128MB but what the hell . . .). I then downloaded
SP1 and all the critical updates, DX 9b, etc, etc., etc. All that went
pretty well - no crashes whatsoever, even though I DID have to do
multiple restarts after the various downloads (that's one area where
*nix has Win9x/XP beat cold - no need to restart for ANYTHING short of a
kernel upgrade). Just in case, though, after each restart I killed all
the superfluous tasks again.

So after all that was done, I started experimenting with the startup
services to see if one of them was killing my system. I got lucky - the
first thing I tried did the trick. It was an Epson printer monitor
utility that runs as a service. The odd thing is that I've been using
the same printer for about seven or eight months and all of the sudden
it's FUBARing my system. It must be incompatible with some Windows
Critical Update or another.

Anyway, problem solved and a good (if trying) exercise in Windows
diagnosis. So now I can play with Orbiter this weekend after all :-)

--
Herb Schaltegger, Esq.
Chief Counsel, Human O-Ring Society
"I was promised flying cars! Where are the flying cars?!"
~ Avery Brooks