Current Versions of Virtual AGC Downloads
Target Platform
Description
Download Version
Instructions
All platforms
Complete source code (Apps, AGC, and AEA)
Current at GitHub Building from source
Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, or FreeBSD (32- or 64-bit 'x86)
VirtualBox virtual machine (Apps, AGC source code, and visual AGC debugging).

Since the VM is a rather substantial download (~1GB), you normally wouldn't want to download it very often, and instead would just update it with new VirtualAGC software, as needed, after the initial download.  But sometimes the improvements to the VM itself are substantial enough to justify re-downloading it in its entirety, so here is a brief change history to let you decide.  Note that older versions of the VM are not retained on this site, so only the latest one listed in the change history is still available.  Note also that a complete re-download of the VM requires erasing the old VM, putting the downloaded one in the same location as the old VM on your host machine.
  • 2017-04-20:
    • [Note:  I recommend installing a later version of the Midori browser, by executing the following command from a command-line in the VM:  "sudo apt-add-repository ppa:midori/ppa && sudo apt-get update -qq && sudo apt-get install midori".  You will be prompted for a password, which is "virtualagc".]
    • Virtual disk size increased from 5GB to 9GB, therefore, more actual disk space on the host-system is required as well.
    • Space reserved for a swap-partition, though not enabled.
    • Cut-and-paste between VM and host machine is now enabled by default.
    • Language support and keyboard-layout for the VM added (beyond just U.S. English), with desktop launcher icon for selecting among them.
    • "Update VirtualAGC" launcher icon added to desktop, for easy updates to the VirtualAGC software.
    • 2017-04-17 version of VirtualAGC software.
  • 2017-03-29:
    • Added Code::Blocks visual-debugging launchers for many more AGC versions.
    • Eliminated the password entry associated with the screen-saver.
    • Default browser changed, for much faster viewing of AGC program listings.  [Note: It turns out that there are oddities about the way this browser, Midori, has been working, so I would advise installing a newer version of it.  From within a command-line in the VM, execute the following command: "sudo apt-add-repository ppa:midori/ppa && sudo apt-get update -qq && sudo apt-get install midori".  You will be prompted for a password, which is "virtualagc".]
    • 2017-03-29 version of VirtualAGC software.
  • 2016-11-19: 
    • Initial version of VM.
    • 2016-11-19 version of VirtualAGC software.
2017-03-29, 1.2GB
(10GB uncompressed)
Using the VM

or

Updating the VM to latest version of VirtualAGC (see next item)
Ubuntu 14.04 (32-bit 'x86)
App-installation tarball
2017-08-31, 26MB
(418MB uncompressed)
Using Ubuntu installer
Raspberry Pi (Raspbian-Jessie)
App-installation tarball
2017-08-31, 26MB
(418MB uncompressed)
Using Raspbian tarball
Windows
App-installation tarball
2017-08-31, 27MB
(418MB uncompressed)
Using Windows tarball


Older Versions
Target Platform
Description
Download Version
Instructions
Ubuntu 14.04 (32-bit 'x86)
App-installation tarball
2017-04-17, 21MB Using Ubuntu installer
Ubuntu 14.04 (32-bit 'x86)
App-installation tarball
2017-03-29, 23MB
Using Ubuntu installer
Ubuntu 14.04 (32-bit 'x86)
App-installer program
2017-03-27, 42MB
Using Ubuntu installer
Ubuntu 14.04 (32-bit 'x86)
App-installer program
2016-11-16, 27MB Using Ubuntu installer
Raspberry Pi (Raspbian-Jessie)
App-installation tarball
2017-03-29, 21MB Using Raspbian tarball
Raspberry Pi (Raspbian-Jessie)
App-installation tarball
2016-08-13, 12MB
Using Raspbian tarball
Windows
App-installation tarball
2017-03-29, 23MB Using Windows tarball
Very old versions
Very, very old versions

Contents

Introduction

This page covers various ways to download and/or install Virtual AGC project software.  Three methods are currently recommended, and a fourth is possible if not really recommended:

  1. If you simply wish to run one of the provided AGC or AEA simulations, examine the AGC or AEA program code, and/or do visual debugging of (Block II) AGC code, then the easiest thing to do is to download and run the provided VirtualBox virtual machine.  The VM is guaranteed to work properly on any 32-bit or 64-bit 'x86 platform for which VirtualBox is available, namely Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris, and (according to this page) FreeBSD as well even though the latter is not obvious from the VirtualBox website.
  2. If you just happen to have a computer system which is currently supported by an installation package, then you can simply download and install the proper installation package.  At present, however, these platforms are only the following:
    1. Raspberry Pi
    2. Ubuntu 14.04 32-bit 'x86.
    3. Windows.
  3. If you wish to do not only the above, but also wish to delve more deeply into the Virtual AGC project code (as opposed to just the AGC/AEA code), then you should instead download the Virtual AGC source code, and perhaps build it yourself.  This works on many more platforms, though is more-involved to set up, and visual AGC debugging may not be possible easily on platforms other than 'x86 Windows, Mac, or Linux.
  4. If you are satisfied with older versions of Virtual AGC, many additional computer platforms were once directly supported with installer programs, which you can still find here or here.  Ideally, we would like to directly support all major platforms with Virtual AGC installer programs, but in practice it is far too hard to do so with the resources available at present, so this is no longer being done currently.

Note that a lot of detail about known quirks on different platforms, and about trouble-shooting, can be found at the older links listed in approach #4 above, but isn't found on the present page.  That's because the information hasn't been updated in so long that its reliability is dubious, and because many of the platforms mentioned there are long-obsolete.  It should also be noted that the build-instructions for some platforms presented here are similarly out-of-date and may need corrections.

Downloading, Running, or Updating Virtual AGC in VirtualBox

Characteristics of the Virtual AGC VM

My descriptions in this section relate to the 2017-04-20 version of both the VM and the VirtualAGC software, so other versions may be slightly different ... but this still gives the general idea.

The virtual-machine approach should work with any host system supported by VirtualBox:  namely, any 32-bit or 64-bit 'x86 version of Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, or FreeBSD.  The VM is nice because it lets you work with the most-commonly-desired elements of Virtual AGC, while skipping past the most-annoying and tricky setup steps, such as compiling Virtual AGC's source code.  It provides you with a "virtual machine", with Virtual AGC and other things you need in order to be able to work with Virtual AGC already pre-installed and pre-configured.  Though like anything else done to make our lives "simpler", it brings its own (hopefully smaller!) set of problems with it.

When the VM is run, the first thing you see is the VirtualAGC GUI, from which you can run an AGC simulation using various selectable options.  There are actually two different versions, and which you'll see depends on how large your (virtual) display screen is:  For screens smaller than 1200×1024 you'll get the interface below left, whereas for larger screens you'll get the one below right.  Unfortunately, they don't resize if you resize your virtual display screen, in which case you may simply need to exit from the program and restart it.  The two interfaces have exactly the same capabilities, except the smaller, left-hand one doesn't allow you to run "custom" AGC-software versions:

You can do a number of things from this VirtualAGC GUI, such as run the simulation (below left) or browse nicely syntax-highlighted AGC source code (below right):




If you exit from the VirtualAGC GUI, you'll see the VM's bare desktop, on which a number of other useful options appear:



The VM actually runs Ubuntu Linux, and if you're not an American, you might want to configure language options or keyboard-layout options.  (Or you might not care about those things, since the language options only affect the VM and not VirtualAGC, and you have very little need to use the keyboard ... but still.)  For VM versions 2017-04-20 or later, the overall language selection is in the desktop icon called "Language Support"; all languages supported by Ubuntu are already loaded, so you don't need to download any new ones, but you do need to select the one you want (if it's not U.S. English).  By the way, that's not what's depicted above; what you see in the screenshot above is the keyboard-layout selection list, which you can get by clicking the icon that looks like a keyboard near the desktop's bottom right.  There are actually a lot more layouts available than what's shown, but to get more of them, such as Arabic or Chinese or whatever, you need to use the "Keyboard Input Methods" icon first, to add the layout you need to this pop-up menu.

Some other very-useful icons you can see on this desktop are:
Code::Blocks is a popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE).  Within it, you can edit the AGC source code and reassemble it ... but more importantly, you can visually debug it: i.e., single-step through the AGC code, examine AGC variables, and so forth, so that you can get a very intimate understanding of how the AGC code works, if that's something that interests you.  For example, in the VM screenshot below, the Luminary 131 (Apollo 13 LM) code is being debugged, and the program is at line 379 (the EXTEND instruction) of the Fresh Start and Restart section of the code.



Okay, enough of the sales pitch already!  What's do you actually have to do to install the thing?

Installation of the Virtual AGC VM

It's hard to pin down exactly what computer resources you'll need to run the VM.  The minimum is probably around 2 GB of RAM and 30GB of free disk space, but the more of everything you have, the better.  In particular, you will have a far more satisfactory experience if your CPU has VT-x (Intel) or AMD-V (AMD) extensions.  The VM itself requires only about 10GB of disk space, but in the process of decompressing the downloaded VM, you'll temporarily need a lot more (hence the 30GB mentioned).

Before doing anything with Virtual AGC as such, you should take care of the following:

Then to actually install the VirtualAGC VM, you do the following.

  1. Download the current compressed VM, as listed at the top of this page.
  2. Uncompress it, resulting in a folder called "VirtualAGC-runtime".  (This may or may not be a 2-step process, in which a tar file is first created, which in turn would need to be expanded to get the mentioned folder.)  The tar.xz/tar file(s) are no longer used after that and may be deleted ... though obviously we'd prefer you retained it for a while to make sure you don't need to download it again if some mishap occurs.  VirtualBox tends to store all of its virtual machines in the same folder (on Linux, for example, that folder is "~/VirtualBox VMs"), so although it's not necessary to do so, you might want to move the VirtualAGC-runtime folder into the corresponding "VirtualBox VMs" folder on your computer.
  3. In whatever file-system browser your computer has, descend into the VirtualAGC-runtime folder, and double-click the mouse on the file VirtualAGC-runtime.vbox.  This makes VirtualBox aware of your VM, and may or may not actually immediately run it.  At any rate, the VM will be visible in VirtualBox's manager program, and you can run it from there.

In its as-downloaded form, the VM is typically configured to use 1GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores.  You may be able dial these settings down in VirtualBox, but you may need to scale your expectations at the same time.

As I mentioned above, the username and password for the VM are both "virtualagc".  Since you are automatically logged in whenever you run the VM, you don't normally need this information, but it's good to know just in case (for example) you ever need to install some new, non-Virtual-AGC software on it, or perform some other administrative action.

Finally, technically, for any Linux pros, the VM does not have any swap space.  If that makes you uncomfortable, versions the VM from 2017-04-20 or later actually have an uncommitted 1GB partition on the virtual disk which you can assign as swap space if you want.  I normally don't to this because I don't think it's necessary, but mainly because filling that partition with a lot of random garbage just causes more hassle in trying to create a "small" downloadable image.

Updating the Virtual AGC VM

Because the VM is such a large download, you don't want to have to download it every time there's updated Virtual AGC software, and usually just want to update the VirtualAGC software within the VM.

For VM versions 2017-04-20 or later, this update process is really easy:  There's simply a desktop icon called "Update VirtualAGC" that you can double-click.  It will tell you what the latest VirtualAGC version is, and you can tell it either YES or NO.

For earlier VM versions, you can download a script that does the same thing.  Just put it somewhere (say in the "home" directory, /home/virtualagc/), and then from a command-line run the following command:

bash ./UpdateVirtualAGC

Platforms Directly Supported by Virtual AGC Installers

Virtual AGC Installer for Raspberry Pi (Raspbian)

Installation is trivial:
  1. Download the current Raspberry Pi installation tarball, as listed at the top of this page.
  2. Unpack the installation tarball somewhere:  either "tar -xJvf VirtualAGC-Raspbian-VERSION.tar.xz" or "tar -xjvf VirtualAGC-Raspbian-VERSION.tar.bz2", depending on which type of installer is downloaded.  (Notice that these two commands are not the same, in that one has a 'j' where the other has a 'J'.)
This gives you a directory called VirtualAGC/ (or lVirtualAGC/ if the older .bz2 form of the installer was used).  Before running the program for the first time, there's a one-time setup you may have to do:
sudo apt-get install libwxgtk2.8-0 libsdl libncurses5 liballegro4 tk
To run the program, simply do the following from the command line, or set up a desktop icon that does the equivalent:
cd VirtualAGC/Resources
../bin/VirtualAGC

Installer for Ubuntu 14.04 32-bit 'x86 Linux

  1. For a first-time installation only, you may have to install the following system libraries from the Ubuntu repository:  tk, libsdl1.2, libncurses5, liballegro4.4, libgtk2.0, libwxgtk2.8.
  2. Another one-time step is downloading the update script, UpdateVirtualAGC.
  3. Run the command "bash UpdateVirtualAGC".
  4. If you try to use the ACA simulation (joystick) and it doesn't work, read about configuring it.

Installer for Windows

Installation is as follows:

  1. Download the current Windows installation tarball, as listed at the top of this page.
  2. Unpack the installation tarball somewhere:  I did this by using 7zip, but I believe there are a lot of other possibilities as well.  With 7zip, the unpacking was a two-step process, first to turn VirtualAGC-Windows-VERSION.tar.xz into VirtualAGC-Windows-VERSION.tar, and then to turn the latter file into the uncompressed folder VirtualAGC.  (At which point the tar.xz and tar files are no longer needed and can be deleted.)
This gives you a folder called VirtualAGC.  This folder can be stored any place you like, though I usually copy it into the same folder I find myself in when opening up a DOS command line.  Just for the sake of discussion, let's suppose you've done this too, and so you now have a file called C:\Users\YourNameHere\VirtualAGC.

To run the program, my suggestion would be to create a desktop shortcut for it.  I'm no Windows aficionado, but I think the basic steps to do that are these:
  1. Right-click on the desktop, and choose New/Shortcut in the pop-up menu that appears.
  2. The popup window that appears will ask you for the location of the program you want to run.  It is C:\Users\YourNameHere\VirtualAGC\bin\VirtualAGC.exe.
  3. After the shortcut has been created on the desktop, right-click it and select Properties.  Change the "Start in" or "Working directory" to be C:\Users\YourNameHere\VirtualAGC\Resources.
  4. If you're really very keen on getting everything just so, that same Properties window from step 3 above also lets you change the icon displayed on the desktop.  It's entirely optional, but I'd suggest using C:\Users\YourNameHere\VirtualAGC\Resources\ApolloPatch2-transparent.ico.
You should now be able to run VirtualAGC simply by double-clicking the desktop shortcut you've created.

Another way to use the program is from a command line.  In the command line, do this:
  1. C:   
  2. cd C:\Users\YourNameHere\VirtualAGC\Resources
  3. ..\bin\VirtualAGC

Downloading and Building Virtual AGC from Source

Limitation

Building Virtual AGC from source actually has a limitation compared to running the VM as described above, which is that while the VM is already set up for visual debugging of AGC code using Code::Blocks, this capability is not a part of Virtual AGC proper.  That is, Code::Blocks based AGC debugging has its own set of installations, requirements, and setups, distinct from those of building Virtual AGC proper ... which is what's discussed below.  If (once Virtual AGC is built and working satisfactorily) you want to do visual debugging, you need to install Code::Blocks and should consult the instructions for development using Code::Blocks on our GitHub wiki, as well as the instructions for visual debugging.

Of course, it also has the limitation that we can't actually deal with every platform people might try to use.  So I make a pretty strong effort to make sure it works on Ubuntu- and Debian-based 64-bit 'x86 Linux, which I use every day, and occasionally (rarely) try to check that the process still works on whatever versions of Raspberry Pi, Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Solaris it happens to be convenient for me to run personally.

Getting the Source Code

The complete up-to-the-moment source code is available from GitHub.  There are several ways which one might choose to download it, such as in a zipfile or using the 'git' program, which in Linux (for example) would look like this:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc

In either case, you end up with a folder called virtualagc. 

What you do with it after that depends on which platform you intend to run Virtual AGC on, and that's the topic of the next few sections.  It's also possible that the instructions at the GitHub repository may (or may not) be more up-to-date than those here.

CMake-Based Builds

Because I am lazy, I prefer to develop software only with the tools I already know and understand.  Usually, roughly speaking, those end up being the minimalist tools that there's a fighting chance the majority of developers can also work with somewhat easily.  For better or worse, that's why all of the "official" build instructions for Virtual AGC on various target platforms in the following sections are based simply on 'make' (specifically, GNU 'make'), without the fancier kind of build environments that may be easier for the user but have a steeper learning curve for the developer.  For example, among the "fancy" build environments I'm referring to are those based on autoconf/automake or CMake, which many would prefer.  I myself might prefer them ... as a user rather than a maintainer!

However, not everyone is as lazy as I or philosophically inclined in quite the same way, so sometimes others step up to fill in the gaps I've left.  This is the case with CMake-based builds of Virtual AGC.  Michael Hirsch has stepped up to do so (thanks, Michael!), and if the "official" instructions below don't appeal to you, or if you simply like the idea of using CMake, Michael's documentation for the CMake-based build process can be found in our GitHub repository's wiki.

Since Michael maintains both that wiki page and the CMake process itself, please don't attempt to get any sensible response from me (RSB) if you encounter problems them or have questions.  You'll want to use our GitHub repository's issue system to report problems, or direct inquiries via the GitHub communication system to Michael's tag (@scivision).

Linux


This works!
Last verified (Mint 21 Mate 64-bit): 2022-08-07

Last verified (Mint 20.1 Mate 64-bit): 2022-08-07
Last verified (Mint 19 Mate 64-bit): 2022-08-07
Last verified (Mint 17.3 Mate 64-bit): 2022-08-07

Last verified (Mint 17.3 Mate 64-bit, clang 3.9): 2022-08-07
Last verified (Mint 32-bit): 2019-09-22
Last verified (Fedora 26 64-bit): 2017-08-31
Last verified (Slackware 14.2): 2021-03-21
Last verified (Chromebook): 2021-03-21

These instructions apply to building Virtual AGC on Ubuntu-like systems, but are probably pretty applicable to most Ubuntu, Debian, or Mint desktop systems.  Please realize that while Linux is my own working environment of choice, I don't have time to support every possible Linux variant, and don't intend to even pretend to do so any longer. 

I primarily use Linux Mint.  Since Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu Linux according to the following table, it's probably a reasonable supposition that if I can build Virtual AGC for the Mint versions shown above, then you can build it for the Ubuntu versions shown below.  Not that I guarantee it!

One-Time Setup

Unfortunately, I cannot give you an exact list of package names even for my own distribution of choice.  They change over time!  So you'll have to take the following information only as suggestions.  If you find things you need to do differently, let me know and perhaps I can incorporate that info here.

I have lately started encountering systems (Linux Mint and Ubuntu, I'm looking at you!) for which the Virtual AGC build procedure described below fails, due the operating system being configured in such a way that the Python interpreter cannot be found even though we (Virtual AGC) are referencing it as described in Python documentation.  If you try the following from a command line,

    /usr/bin/env python

and it fails to actually run Python, then you have this issue and must fix it before proceeding.  On some versions of Linux Mint and Ubuntu, there are packages called "python-is-python2" and "python-is-python3" which can fix the problem.  On some versions, just reinstalling Python 3 or Python 2 will fix the problem.

Building Virtual AGC Once the One-Time Setup Is Complete

In the Virtual AGC source directory, run

    make install

or

    make clean install

This does not require a 'sudo', and you shouldn't use one.

By the way, it's preferable to build Virtual AGC on a clean Linux installation.  If (like me) you have a system that's used extensively for software development, you may have lots of stuff installed beyond what's mentioned above.  That extra stuff may cause you problems.  Hopefully that won't happen to most people, but I suspect that a higher percentage of folks interested in Virtual AGC would have this kind of problem than those picked at random from the general population.  For example, I have this problem myself on one system of the several I use.  This particular offending development system is a 64-bit Linux Mint 17.3 system, but with multiple versions of gcc, libstdc++, and wxGTK installed.  The resulting (unclean) system can build the Virtual AGC software fine, but not run it once built, because of a mismatch between the default versions of the compiler and the share libraries installed.  This isn't a problem with Virtual AGC as such, but is simply the result of not having a clean Linux installation in which everything is guaranteed to work with everything else.

One potential fix is to have a virtual machine with a clean Linux installation on which you can build Virtual AGC; i.e., simply bypass your "dirty" build setup completely.  This is usually quite a hassle. 

A better solution, when feasible, would be to use extra command-line switches for 'make', to eliminate conflicts by overriding the default compiler choices.  There are two such switches, FORCE_cc and FORCE_CC, which respectively override the C compiler and the C++ compiler.  For example, on my offending Linux Mint 17.3 system, I can get around the goofed-up system libraries with the following dodge, which forces the use of an older compiler (gcc 4.8) vs the latest version I've installed (gcc 8.3):

    make FORCE_cc=/usr/bin/gcc FORCE_CC=/usr/bin/g++ clean install

See the comments in the Makefile itself for more explanation.  The switches can override not merely the filesystem paths for locating the compiler (when you have multiple versions of gcc or g++ installed), but can be used to specify completely different C/C++ compilers, such as clang (which might be installed using a command such as "sudo apt-get install clang-3.9 libclang-3.9-dev").  As an example, the command I use to build Virtual AGC using clang rather than gcc/g++ is:

make FORCE_clang=yes FORCE_cc=/usr/bin/clang-3.9 FORCE_CC=/usr/bin/clang++-3.9 clean install

The switch FORCE_clang in this case provides some additional clang tweaks beyond just the compiler locations.  (Don't interpret this as a claim that clang is supported.  It's not!  But you may be able to get away with using it, if you're adventurous.)

Running VirtualAGC Once It Has Been Built

On supported Linux variants, the build process creates a desktop icon from which you can run Virtual AGC.  In some versions of Linux, you will need to right-click the icon and indicate that it is "trusted" before it will work properly. You can "uninstall" by removing the icon, the ~/VirtualAGC folder (which is the installation directory), and the source-code directory you downloaded from GitHub.

On unsupported Linux variants, there may be no desktop icon or it may not work, and you may need to run the program from a command line, as follows:
cd ~/VirtualAGC/Resources
../bin/VirtualAGC

Raspberry Pi (Raspbian)


This works!
Last verified (Raspbian Jessie): 2017-11-20
Last verified (Raspbian Stretch): 2018-05-11
See notes below for Raspbian Buster

These instructions relate to building Virtual AGC on a Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspbian-Jessie, though they're not really specific to any particular Pi model.  For example, the instructions also work, unchanged, on a Pi B+ and a Pi Zero (though I would not recommend running VirtualAGC on them, unless you like to snooze).  This really isn't any different from building it on any other Linux system, but I'll go through the steps separately anyway, using a completely clean Raspbian installation.  Laszlo Morocz provided the original idea. 

One-time setup:

sudo apt-get install wx2.8-headers libwxgtk2.8-0 libwxgtk2.8-dev libsdl-dev libncurses5-dev liballegro4-dev git
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc

The "sudo apt-get install ..." step given above is inadequate in some versions of Raspbian, and may need modifications:

Building Virtual AGC:

cd virtualagc
make install

or perhaps "make clean install" instead.  (No 'sudo' should be used with the 'make', nor is it a good idea to build from the root account, since I gather there's no desktop for the root user.)  This process creates a desktop icon from which you can run Virtual AGC.  You can "uninstall" by removing the icon, the ~/VirtualAGC folder, and the source-code directory you downloaded from GitHub.

FreeBSD


This works!
Last verified: 2017-08-31

The instructions here relate to building Virtual AGC using PC-BSD 10.3, desktop version.  That isn't the latest version of FreeBSD (version 11), but it's much easier to install than FreeBSD proper, and should be 100% equivalent for the same version numbers.  At any rate, I know nothing about FreeBSD, so my instructions may not be the most-efficient ones.  The executive summary is that the build process works, and VirtualAGC acts normally once built. 

Setup:
  1. Install 'cmake' and GNU 'make' (gmake) using the "package" system, with the command "sudo pkg install cmake gmake".
  2. Install the "ports" system, if you haven't already.
  3. Install wxWidgets 2.8.12, or as close to that 2.8.x version as you can get, using the "ports" system:  "cd /usr/ports/x11-toolkits/wxgtk28" and "sudo make install".
  4. For whatever reason, the 'wx-config' program is installed with a different name.  Make a symbolic link with the proper name for it somewhere in your path:  "mkdir $HOME/bin" and "ln -s /usr/local/bin/wxgtk2u-2.8-config $HOME/bin/wx-config".  If you test this with the command "wx-config --list", you should see that the default wxWidgets configuration is "gtk2-unicode-release-2.8".
  5. Download Allegro 4.4.2, or as close to that 4.4.x version as you can get.  Prior to building Allegro, I had to do this: "sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libasound* /usr/lib"; I'm sure there's a much cleaner way to handle that problem (namely, that Allegro couldn't find libasound), but I don't know what it is.  To build and install, do this:

Building Virtual AGC:

This process creates a desktop icon from which you can run Virtual AGC.  You can "uninstall" by removing the icon, the ~/VirtualAGC folder, and the source-code directory you downloaded from GitHub.

Solaris


This works!
Last verified: 2017-08-31

The instructions here relate to building Virtual AGC using Solaris 11.3.  Note that my personal knowledge of Solaris is mid-way between "completely ignorant" and "dangerously misinformed", so you have to take what I say with a grain of salt.  Nevertheless, the executive summary is that the instructions do work.

One-time setup:
  1. Install Oracle Developer Studio tools.  I used version 12.5, and only installed the tools rather than the complete IDE.  This is to give you the C and C++ compilers ('cc' and 'CC'), which have command-line options required by wxWidgets but not supported by 'gcc'.
  2. Install the Open CSW system, add /opt/csw/bin to your PATH, and /opt/csw/lib to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
  3. Install wxWidgets via the Open CSW system.
  4. Install gtk2, tcl-8, tk-8, ncurses, freeglut, cmake, and gnu-grep using the Package Manager.

Build Virtual AGC:

This creates a Virtual AGC launcher (which is actually just a shell script) on the Desktop, and you can run Virtual AGC from that.  If it asks you whether to "Run" or "Run in terminal", the proper choice is "Run".  Unfortunately, no icon gets associated with the launcher, but you can optionally associate one by right-clicking on the launcher, selecting Properties, and using ~/VirtualAGC/Resources/ApolloPatch2-transparent.png as the image.

You can "uninstall" by the deleting the desktop launcher, the  ~/VirtualAGC folder, and the source-code directory you downloaded from GitHub.

Mac OS X

This works!
Last verified: 2021-11-12

There are aspects of Virtual AGC that I simply can't personally check on Mac OS X, because Apple no longer supports my particular Mac with newer versions of Mac OS X.  I'm stuck at Mac OS X Lion (10.7), and with whatever version of Xcode is compatible with that.  The Apple Way out of this situation is, of course, simply to buy a new Mac which can run a newer Mac OS.  But the Tao of Apple is not the Tao of Ron.

One particular drawback of this situation is that Xcode is now apparently based on the clang compiler, rather than on the gcc compiler that Virtual AGC was designed for.  Now that I've found this out, of course, Virtual AGC has been adapted for use with clang, and seems to work well with clang on the Linux platforms I use for development purposes.  But I can't personally test it for you on the Mac, since the Xcode on my older Mac uses gcc.

Now that I've warned you, the subsections below cover what I know and what I theorize about building Virtual AGC on Macs.

Older Macs: Xcode with gcc

The executive summary is that this works (on my Mac, with Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 and Xcode 4.6.3) and the simulated AGC, DSKY, etc., can be run.  The only problem is that the pretty, syntax-highlighted AGC source code may not be browsable from within VirtualAGC.

Setup:
  1. Install most-current version of Xcode for your version of Mac OS X ... of course!  I use Xcode 4.6.3.
  2. Install MacPorts.
  3. Use MacPorts to install wxWidgets 2.8.12:  "sudo port install wxgtk-2.8" or "sudo port install wxWidgets-2.8", depending on your Xcode version.
  4. Use MacPorts to install cmake:  "sudo port install cmake".
  5. Install Allegro 4.4.2:

Building Virtual AGC:

  1. 'cd' into Virtual AGC source directory, as obtained from GitHub.
  2. Determine where wxWidgets was installed by using the command "port contents wxgtk-2.8 | grep /bin/" (or "port contents wxWidgets-2.8 | grep /bin/").  What you're actually trying to find out is the directory in which the program 'wx-config' is installed.  In my case, I found that the location was /opt/local/Library/Frameworks/wxWidgets.framework/Versions/wxGTK/2.8/bin.  You have to add that to your PATH, so that the 'wx-config' program can be found during the build.  The command is "export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/.../bin".  You can test that it worked with a command like "wx-config --list", from which we would like to see that the default configuration is "gtk2-unicode-release-2.8".  By the way, unless you make this change to the PATH permanent (which is done in ~/.profile), the PATH will be reset back to the default one as soon as you close the command-line terminal you're using for this.
  3. Do "make MACOSX=yes install" or "make MACOSX=yes clean install".
The result is that a new app icon appears on the desktop, and you can launch VirtualAGC from that.

However, not all features of the VirtualAGC GUI program necessarily work.  For example, while you can run simulated AGCs (which is the main thing!), you may not be able to browse the AGC source code from within VirtualAGC.  What is supposed to happen when you use VirtualAGC's source-browsing feature is that it simply launches whatever default web-browser you have set up on your system, and shows you the AGC/AEA source code within that browser ... and indeed, this approach used to work in Mac OS X.  But what happens for me is that there's simply an error message complaining that "There is no default application configured for HTML files".  However, I can certainly configure the default browser, and have changed it back and forth between Safari and Chrome, so I'm not sure what this message is complaining about.  Perhaps it's an X11 error.  At any rate, I have not been able to solve it.  You can still browse the source, of course:  simply right-click on the VirtualAGC app icon on the desktop, and select "show package contents"; navigate down to Contents/Resources/source/, select the mission you're interested in, and double-click on the MAIN.agc.html file you find in that directory.  It will open up in your default browser, just as it should have done in the VirtualAGC program.

Another quirk that may be of interest on the Mac is how to run individual GUI applications like yaDSKY2 or yaTelemetry, without having to run the VirtualAGC application.  Again, right-click on the VirtualAGC desktop icon and select "show package contents".  Navigate down to Contents/MacOS/, and you'll find the various individual GUI applications there, where you can simply run them by double-clicking on them.

Newer Macs: Xcode with clang

Ludo Visser has sent me instructions for building Virtual AGC on a clean installation of MacOS 12.0.1 (Monterey).  Virtual AGC itself required no changes.  He does mention that he didn't try it out with a joystick, but other than that indicates that Virtual AGC does work "out of the box" after he builds it.   

So here are his instructions, verbatim:

  1. Install Xcode command line tools
          xcode-select --install
  1. Install Macports per the instructions.
  2. In a shell session:
          sudo port install git +credential_osxkeychain
          sudo port install wxWidgets-3.2
          port contents wxWidgets-3.2  | grep bin  # note path
          export PATH=/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/wxWidgets.framework/Versions/wxWidgets/3.1/bin:$PATH # path from command above
          export cc=clang
          export CC=clang
          git clone https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc.git
          cd virtualagc
          make MACOSX=yes FORCE_clang=yes clean install
On some versions of Mac OS, the Virtual AGC build procedure can no longer find the Python interpreter, and our build procedure thus fails.  You can diagnose this problem by running

    /usr/bin/env python

from a command line.  If it fails, then Virtual AGC will fail to build.  It's almost certain that you actually do have a Python interpreter installed, however, but the command env python simply isn't set up correctly.  I don't have any great advice as to how to solve the problem in a "Mac" way, so you may have to google it. Some users have found that you may be able to fix the problem by explicitly installing Python 2, which apparently is no longer installed by default for Mac OS 12.3 or later.  As of this writing, the MacOS installer for the so-called "final" release of Python 2, namely Python 2.7.18, can be found at python.org

Windows


This works!
Last verified (Andy Smith): 2021-05-24
Last verified (RSB): 2017-08-31


Concerning the build verifications listed above:  After my last personal (RSB) verification I had gotten various hints from correspondents that Windows 64-bit builds no longer worked properly.  Also, I was told that in all MinGW builds the AGC program SUNBURST 37 no longer assembled correctly.  Subsequent fixes have hopefully corrected those issues, but I have not personally verified the builds.  Thanks to Andy Smith for that.  Also, I'm told that Cygwin builds work as well, though I have not tried it within recent memory, nor can I provide any specific set of instructions for doing so.

This section relates to building Virtual AGC on 64-bit Windows 7, though the procedure doesn't seem to have anything in it that's specific to that version of Windows.  (It's merely that I've only tried it on Windows 7.  On occasion, I've copied the results into Windows XP and run VirtualAGC there as well, but I don't always do that.)  The building process uses MinGW/Msys (as opposed to Visual Studio), and I don't know whether or not there is a valid Visual Studio build process.

First-time setup of the Windows box is somewhat time-consuming (but building Virtual AGC is pretty easy after that):
  1. Install the MinGW compiler and the Msys Linux-like command-line development environment, using the downloadable "MinGW Installation Manager".  This installation program changes over time, so I cannot tell you precisely how to use it, and can only give you a general idea.  Use the default choices for installation directory (c:\mingw) and other settings, if any are offered.  Note that by default, the batch file c:\mingw\msys\1.0\msys.bat is what's used to start the Msys command shell as in the next step below, and you might want to manually create a desktop icon or a Windows start-menu entry for running that batch file.  If you are unlucky enough to have a Windows user name containing spaces, you will encounter difficulties.  The instructions at the www.mingw.org website explain what to do in that situation.  Specific packages which you need to install using the MinGW Installation Manager, at least at this writing, which may not be among the defaults are:
  2. Run Msys, to bring up a command shell.  All of the following steps occur within this command shell and not at a "DOS" command line.  Some of the "DOS" commands you probably are familiar with (such as "dir") don't work in this shell, while Linux-type replacements ("ls -l") are used instead.  Some commands, like "cd", work almost the same way, though there are subtle differences. Also, '/' is the separator for folders in path-names, rather than '\'.  Google for "bash" if you're interested in these kinds of differences. 
  3. Install the SDL library, version 1.2.  You should find that there is a download file specifically labeled as a Win32 development library for MinGW.  Within your Msys home directory, unpack the download file, 'cd' into the directory it creates.  Do "mkdir /usr/local", and run the command "make install-sdl prefix=/usr/local".  (The /usr directory within Msys will probably correspond to something like c:\mingw\msys\1.0\ in your Windows filesystem.)   Note:  All software needed to build Virtual AGC will be installed under /usr/local, so eventually it will be populated with sub-directories such as /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/include, /usr/local/lib, and so on.  The Virtual AGC makefiles are hard-coded to assume these installation locations.  Note, however, that the Virtual AGC binaries you are going to create are not installed under /usr/local, because while the Virtual AGC apps are being created using Msys, Msys is not needed to run them ... they are simply Windows programs like any other.
  4. Obtain a source zipfile of wxWidgets, version 2.8.12, or as close to this 2.8.x version as is available.  Of the several varieties offered for download (wxAll, wxMSW, wxGTK, ...) chose wxMSW, and make sure you get the source code rather than an installer program.  Unzip the downloaded file in your home directory, 'cd' into the directory this creates, and then do "./configure --enable-unicode", "make", and "make install".
  5. Though it has nothing to do with building Virtual AGC, if you want to have access to Stephen Hotto's contributed Lunar Module accessories when you run Virtual AGC, you'll also have to install Tcl/Tk
Once this one-time setup is complete, you should now be able to build Virtual AGC as follows.  As above, all of the following steps take place in the Msys command shell, and not from a "DOS" command line:
  1. Get the Virtual AGC source code from GitHub (from the link at the top of this page), either by using 'git', if installed on your computer, or by downloading a zipfile and unzipping it.  For the sake of discussion, I'm going to suppose that the folder you get from doing this is called "virtualagc" and is in your home directory.
  2. Do "cd virtualagc".
  3. Build it: "make WIN32=yes install" or "make WIN32=yes clean install". 
This process may or may not create a desktop launcher for VirtualAGC.  (If not, you can create your own launcher on the desktop.  Just have it run the program C:\Users\YourUserName\VirtualAGC\bin\VirtualAGC.exe, and have it use C:\Users\YourUserName\VirtualAGC\Resources as the starting directory.)

You can "uninstall" simply by removing the desktop icon and %HOMEPATH%\VirtualAGC, and whatever source-folder you downloaded from GitHub.

WebAssembly


This works!
Last verified (RSB, Linux Mint 21): 2022-09-25

I probably don't need to describe what WebAssembly (Wasm) is, since anybody interested enough in reading about how to build Virtual AGC for it almost certainly would know much more about it than I do anyway.  Nevertheless, here's what little I do know.  While WebAssembly apparently has a number of potential use cases, the main use case for it at present seems to be as a way to port applications so that they can run within a web browser ... but to run somewhat faster than if they were instead ported to JavaScript.  Pragmatically, WebAssembly requires a browser which actually supports the WebAssembly virtual machine, though as of this writing (2021-05-26) such support is pretty widespread and includes Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari. 

WebAssembly builds of Virtual AGC don't provide the entire Virtual AGC suite of programs, but merely the AGC CPU emulation (yaAGC).  So the idea is that you can load the WebAssembly build of yaAGC into an HTML web-page you create, along with a core-rope images of an AGC program, and then run the whole thing in a supporting browser of your choice.  Of course, your web-page will also have to provide its own simulation of a DSKY or whatever other of the AGC's peripherals you desire.  In principle, I suppose, you could build an entire CM or LM simulation within your browser. 

However, at least a part of that is available too, but separately (as opposed to being in the Virtual AGC repository).  It's supplied by Michael Franzl, who also created the WebAssembly port in the first place.  Michael's additional code (webAGC) can be found at this link.  It includes code for integrating webAGC into your website, and provides:
And there's a live demo, so you can try it out without any additional effort.  Any description I would give of Michael's live demo would likely be obsolete by the time you read it, but it's worth noting that (at least at this writing) you have to use the live demo's "load program into fixed memory" option first, choosing between the Luminary099 program and the Validation program, and then you have to click the Run button to begin executing the AGC code.  (Or the Step button instead, if you simply want to execute a single AGC instruction rather than to allow the AGC CPU to run freely.)  Subsequently, you can use either the DSKY buttons or else the "DSKY key input" field to interact with the running AGC program.  Luminary099 refers to the AGC program used in the Apollo 11 LM, while Validation is a "modern" AGC program originally written by me to test the simulated AGC CPU.  Some very basic instructions for running Luminary099 or Validation can be found on our website home page. 

Of course, for some years there has already been a JavaScript port of Virtual AGC: moonjs by Shahriar Iravanian (live demo), which runs the Colossus 249 AGC program (Apollo 9 CM).  Moonjs is based on a subset of JavaScript called asm.js, which is optimized to allow faster-execution than arbitrarily-coded full-featured JavaScript programs would.  It would be interesting some day to have a head-to-head speed competition between webAGC and moonjs, though of course if both could achieve speed parity with a physical AGC, then anything beyond that is gravy.  Shahriar's build instructions for moonjs are pretty straightforward, and I won't repeat them here.  I should note that moonjs relies on emscripten to port yaAGC.c to asm.js, but that emscripten now seems to target WebAssembly rather than asm.js, so that train may have left the station!

But as far as the WebAssembly port is concerned, here's my interpretation of Michael's build instructions for Linux Mint 19 or later, 64-bit.  The instructions won't work in Mint 17 or earlier because of library-versioning problems.  First, here is the one-time setup:

cd ~/wasi-sdk
wget https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk/releases/download/wasi-sdk-16/wasi-sdk-16.0-linux.tar.gz
tar xvf wasi-sdk-16.0-linux.tar.gz
export WASI_SDK_PATH=~/wasi-sdk/wasi-sdk-16.0

Note that although I called this a one-time setup, the environment variable WASI_SDK_PATH will remain set only in this particular instance of the command line window, and will not persist if you open another command line afterward.  This lack of persistence only becomes a problem if you later need to compile the WebAssembly target for Virtual AGC again in a new command-line window, and hence need to set WASI_SDK_PATH again.  But you may wish to permanently set this environment variable to avoid confusion later.

Actually building Virtual AGC's WebAssembly target is easy:  Just 'cd' into Virtual AGC source directory, as obtained from GitHub, and then:
cd yaAGC
WASI=yes make [clean] yaAGC.wasm
The file yaAGC/yaAGC.wasm is what you actually need for your web page, so this is the end of the build process for Virtual AGC

Insofar as the details of how to run an actual web page using this yaAGC.wasm target are concerned, if you're a web expert you probably don't need any additional commentary from me.  For someone with a lesser level of expertise, such as myself, perhaps a few more words need to be said.  I'll confine my remarks to Michael's demo code, which is probably what you'd want to start with if you were creating your own web app.
Now, you may wonder why there's a need to run an HTTP server at all, when one could simply browse to "file:///PathToWebAGC/demo/index.html" rather than to "http://localhost:8000/demo/" and seemingly avoid HTTP entirely?  In other words, why can't this demo, or presumably similar web apps, simply run entirely within the browser?  I'll simply quote what Michael has told me:
Browsers can read files even from hard disk and display static websites (html, js, css) just like, say, a word processor displays a word document. Strictly speaking, no HTTP servers are required in that scenario. However, when using more modern browser features, like JavaScript modules, WebAssembly, WebRTC etc., the browser insists that content be served over the network. This doesn't mean that servers need to have any 'business logic' implemented; they can just be static content delivery pipes. In this sense, the webAGC demo is indeed a pure browser/client solution; it is completely unaware of a server.
Which just reminds me of why I have always preferred not to become involved in web programming, and came away frustrated every time I was forced to do so.

iPhone


Still okay?

For development snapshot 20090802 and later, it's possible to build yaAGC—not the entire Virtual AGC suite, just yaAGC—from (I guess) a Mac, if you've downloaded an iPhone development kit.  From the "I guess" in the preceding sentence, you'll probably be able to deduce that I'm just parrotting someone else's words and don't really know what I'm talking about ... and you'd be right.  The instructions and mods necessary to do it came from Alberto Galdo (thanks, Alberto!).  If you try it and it doesn't work, blame me for not implementing Alberto's instructions properly.

To build, simply 'cd' into the yaAGC/yaAGC/ folder and do this:

make IPHONE=yes

As for how useful yaAGC by itself is, it's obviously only marginally useful until such time as there's a DSKY.  You should be able to do command-line debugging, however, so you could in theory run and debug AGC code.

Running the Validation Suite of the simulated AGC

Having installed the software as above, you can test the emulated CPU and DSKY using the "validation suite". 
  1. Run the VirtualAGC program, select "Validation suite" as the simulation type, and hit the "Run" button.
  2. A code of "00" will appear in the PROG area of the DSKY, and the OPR ERR lamp will flash.  This means that the validation program is ready to start.
  3. Press the PRO key on the DSKY.  The OPR ERR light will go off and the validation program will begin.
  4. There is no indication that the test is running.  The test takes about 77 seconds.
  5. If all tests are passed, then the PROG area on the DSKY will show the code "77", and the OPR ERR lamp will flash.  (The return code is 77 because 77 is the largest 2-digit octal number.  It is just a coincidence that the test duration is also 77 seconds.)
  6. If some tests fail, an error code other than "00" or "77" will be displayed in the PROG area on the DSKY, and the OPR ERR lamp will flash.
  7. In the latter case, you can proceed from one test to the next by pressing the PRO key.  The meanings of the error codes are determined by reading the file Validation/Validation.agc.
If this doesn't work for some reason, refer to the trouble-shooting info in the FAQ.

Some Resource Issues on Slower Computers, Such as Raspberry Pi

On new but slow computers like Raspberry Pi, or old computers such as PowerPC-based Macs, the CPU utilization for Virtual AGC can be rather high.  Indeed if you ran every available option on an early-model Pi, you could find yourself using close to 100% of the CPU.  For the default configuration of VirtualAGC (Lunar Module AGC with DSKY and Telemetry but without abort system or IMU), I find the following:

If that's too much for you, there are some things you may be able to do to make it more efficient.  First, note that the VirtualAGC program — which isn't a component of the simulation, but merely a convenient graphical interface so that you don't have to memorize command-line options for the actual components — actually takes 25-30% of the CPU (for either of the two Pi models mentioned above) all by itself.  You don't really need to run it if you don't want to.  But how do you run a simulation easily without VirtualAGC?  Well, if you run the simulation just once from VirtualAGC, and exit the simulation immediately after starting it, you'll find that it has automatically created a script called "simulate" which can be used to start that exact configuration of the simulation without running VirtualAGC itself.  As a result, you get CPU utilizations closer to 50% or 10%, respectively, on the two Pi models mentioned above.  To just run that script, you do this:

cd VirtualAGC/temp/lVirtualAGC/Resources
./simulate



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Last modified by Ronald Burkey on 2022-09-25.

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