Manual Clock

Inputs

This element has no inputs.

Outputs

How It Works

The automatic clock is like a conveyor belt: the circuit races on, and it is hard to watch every part. The Manual Clock is the "freeze frame" button: the circuit moves exactly as far as you allow. One press — one tick.

The key property: a Tick press emits a complete pulse in two simulation steps: 0→1 (the edge — every clocked element captures its data) and then 1→0 (the fall — the values are latched). Example: a D flip-flop with D = 1 shows Q = 1 after the first press; a program counter with a step of 1 creeps forward by exactly one with every press.

A nuance: between presses Tick = 0, but the circuit is not fully asleep — the combinational logic keeps computing and updating the wires. Only the writing freezes: without a new edge the registers will not change their contents.

Examples (press by press)

Each row is exactly one full clock cycle — no more, no less.

Usage

In levels 15 and 29 and in the sandbox the Manual Clock is the main debugging tool: instead of a racing conveyor you step through the program one instruction at a time, watching the program counter, the data bus and the accumulator after every tick. It does not depend on the Clock Control panel and always obeys nothing but your presses.

A concrete use is finding the place where a program "breaks": wire Tick to every clock input instead of Clock, execute instruction by instruction and compare the register states with what you expect. The faulty tick is found at once — it is the first one where a value diverges from the plan.