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Posted By

Litwr
on 2013-09-17
13:41:40
 Game of Life

It is the meeting with my old passion, with the artificial life! happy IMHO Conway's Game Of Life is a bit too *light* for 2013. It supports only 40x25 world. Maybe I should add i/o to Life V1.01, speed up it and ask somebody to port it to C64? happy It is curious what is the 1st GoL for C+4 or C64? I know that there were several GoL for Apple ][ since 80s (e.g.,http://www.bluerwhite.org/2009/08/low-res-life-for-the-apple-ii/). What is the best GoL for C64? BTW I have a hobby project http://freecode.com/projects/xlife. The current unreleased version of it supports hash algorithm allowing to have number of generations beyond any mind's scope, e.g., 10200.

Posted By

Gaia
on 2013-09-17
16:09:07
 Re: Game of Life

This reminds me, I too, have an unreleased C64 Conway conversion from 1987 (!) happy Part of it was machine code, even wink I'll try digging it up for the sake of some digital archeology.

@Litwr: your xlife screen looks gorgeous. I can recall our email conversation on Conway's cell game.

Posted By

Litwr
on 2013-10-29
14:05:52
 Re: Game of Life

Is it a crime to turn a man into obsession? IMHO it is so. Luca, Mkarcz, Gaia - you are guilty! happy You turned me into crazy state of mind. I spent almost all my free time during more than a month under a bit stupid task - the creation of 8-bit port for famous 32-bit program.

It is said that history is only made by crime and madness. So this union shows its productivity again...

It should work with any emulator. However it is the best to use IEC emulation over a directory because of number of the existed patterns. The distribution contains about 2500 patterns but it is possible to use almost all available net's patterns using 'lifeconv' conversion utility.

The IEC emulation realizations are still very poor.

plus4emu can't handle the directory masks, e.g, "*=s".

yape doesn't support u00 and s00 types at all. It can't even handle the provided D64 image in the IEC mode - it doesn't read properly the SEQ and USR files. It can't also handle the directory masks. I could attach D81 image only after several attempts - it looks like that the attachment is not possible after IEC mode over a directory .

Forever Plus/4 Emulator (+4forever?) works fine over a directory - it has only one artificial limitation - it supports up to 412 directory entries.

vice can't also handle the directory masks.

D64 supports only 144 directory entries - it's fewer than required for a work with a lot of patterns. I was surprised that D81 supports only 296 entries...

The speed of evolution depends on the slowness factor. The fastest speed is about 550 generations per second for 0% value of slowness - it is possible for up to 36 cells. The slowest speed is about 0.5 generation per second for 100% of slowness (up to 30720 cells).

The algorithm of Xlife is about 3.5 faster than life v1.01's and the universe is more than 4 times larger.

It is very interesting to port this program to other platform (C64, Amstrad CPC, ...) to test the real speed of CPU. However my obsession is ended for this time.

Posted By

Lavina
on 2013-10-28
05:03:30
 Re: Game of Life

Why is this 'game' so fascinating? I never got it. I remember hearing about it for the first time but it did not fascinate me nor I had the urge to try it... I did something similar out of curiosity in Basic back in my childhood with adjustable settings for the life&death rules as I can recall but I remember that I did not keep it on my cassette for long, it was overwritten with newly arrived games from friends.

Posted By

MMS
on 2013-10-28
16:52:31
 Re: Game of Life

Lavina, you were just not enough "engaged" to your task. You let your creature die happy

Posted By

Litwr
on 2013-10-29
14:03:40
 Re: Game of Life

BASIC? What was the universe size? 16x16?

The artificial life has several interesting points:
1) [for programmers] It is not easy to realize it fast. wink
2) It is curious how so simple cells may be self organized to so difficult structures? It is possible to create even universal computer with self replication function!

BTW It's a bit odd that Xlife is still outside plus4world's software.




Posted By

Luca
on 2013-10-29
15:31:47
 Re: Game of Life

It's odd indeed! happy
I have to search deeply into your site in order to spot it out, but in the end I did. And let me tell you I've never seen a 'Life' version like this, on any machine, it's brilliant!
Litwr, please add what's still missing on Xlife's page!

I'm using YAPE with CPU drive support active, and it works quite good, apart of some times when the disk access breaks. USR and SEQ files are regularly read, so if you pack your patterns in multiple D64s themed archives I see no probs at all ;)



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