Robot Simulation Program Andrew B. Conru’s robot-arm simulator for his ME 435 project, version 1.0, 1990, running from the floppy
- Original 1990 program · his
ROBO1.EXE, unmodified - 1990 · “Ver 1.0 (c) 1990”, EXE dated Sept 4, 1990
- Turbo Pascal 5
- 3,978 lines of his own Pascal in 8 files
- 13 robots in his database, 7 taught-position files
Define an arm by its link parameters, play with its joints, teach it positions and play them back, or move its hand in straight lines with inverse kinematics. This is the program itself, running in DOSBox inside your browser, with his robot database and teaching files from the same disk. Each button below reboots it and types the keystrokes for you, then hands you the keyboard.
Can’t run it here? Watch a 35-second recording
How to use it: click the screen first so it gets your keys. In the arm views, F1–F6 move joints 1–6 and F7 flips their direction (the arrow next to “Variables”). Ctrl-Y, Ctrl-P and Ctrl-R turn the 3-D view. Ctrl-T turns on a tracer, a key his manual doesn’t mention. In Run mode, Enter plays the taught positions. Alt-X/Y/Z work only in RRR Rev.Kin. with the RRR-3D arm, as his manual says. Esc goes back to the menu. On a phone, use the buttons.
What’s original: the program, ROBO1.EXE, byte for byte. Two captures of the floppy (labelled September 1990 and July 1992) hold identical copies. So are his robot database (ROBOFILE.DBF, from the July 1992 capture, because the 1990 copy is partly unreadable) and his .PTP teaching files, except that six entries in the database that looked like people’s names now read “Robot 1” to “Robot 6” in this copy. Nothing in the program was changed. The page only types keys for you. DOSBox stamps the files with today’s date and its own clock shows 1998, so the dates on screen aren’t his.
His words, from the manual: “The second part of the package allows the user to ‘teach’ the robot arm various positions… The third part… generates the variable link parameters using inverse kinematics.” Flip through the 1990 manual, ROBODOC.
Lines counted from his source on the same floppy: ROBO1, ROBOSESS, ROBODBAS, ROBOMISC, ROBOAID, ROBOCOV, DRIVERS and FONTS, 3,978 lines with comments and blank lines. Not counted: ROBOLIST and ROBODIR, 2,245 lines that are lightly edited copies of TechnoJock’s Turbo Toolkit 5.0, a library he licensed. The EXE also contains that toolkit and Borland’s graphics drivers. Emulation is js-dos 8.5.2 (DOSBox in WebAssembly, GPL-2.0), self-hosted in ../js-dos/.