One can find on the web a number of Antikythera Mechanism simulators. These replicate the mechanism's operation in software using computer arithmetic to simulate the gear interactions, and then reflect back the computed results onto the simulated gears... In contrast my implementation is an emulator design of the modern model. The emulator doesn't calculate the gear positions. Instead, it employs mechanical principles (gear teeth pushing each other) to emulate the mechanism at a physical level.

This approach allowed me to experience the physical properties of the mechanism and appreciate the thinking of its ancient developer(s). It also fitted neatly with of the constructivist learning approach of the EToys platform I used.

EToys programming is based on assembling together primitives that manipulate visual objects appearing on the screen...

Each gear and dial appearing on the screen is a separate object. Although the gears may look formidable, building them was simple: I constructed them as polygons, tooth by tooth. I started with an empty polygon. After I added the tooth's two vertices, I rotated the gear by the tooth's displacement, and repeated the operation. This mode of construction resembles the manual cutting of physical gear teeth. Having the gears as polygons makes modeling their interactions a child's play. EToys has a built-in primitive to locate overlapping objects. Thus, on each time step I simply look for overlapping polygons and rotate them in the appropriate direction.