An implementation of Conway's Game of Life for Windows 3.1x and later

43 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by Bluestein
(muppetlabs.com)

10 Comments

vardump

3 minutes ago

I once wrote Game of Life for Amiga bootblock. You can store a bit under 1 kB program in it.

Writing small intros etc. that fit in a bootblock was popular in the late eighties and early nineties.

Bootblock is also where a lot of viruses lived.

DrHungers

an hour ago

Has anyone ever seen a version of the game of life that's actually a playable "game" - that's fun and not just an interesting simulation? I would love to try it.

kej

16 minutes ago

Either the one from Microsoft or another from that era had multiple colors of cells, and an option to play competitively where before each generation you could add one cell of your color. Whether it was actually "fun" is another question.

imp

5 hours ago

Man, that reminds me that as a kid I coded the game of life into Excel with a bunch of nested IF statements. It was a small field, but still a lot of fun

nealabq

4 hours ago

My wife once did the same in VisualBasic. The cells were buttons. Small but fun.

baruz

2 hours ago

I am not too familiar with Windows development in the 16-bit era, so I do not understand what Raiter means when he writes that he “de-Petzoldized” the code. I thought Petzold’s work on documenting the Windows API was foundational. Was it the style?

djriley

2 hours ago

Yes, Petzold's examples used a certain style to illustrate the use of the Windows API as clearly as possible. Petzold programs would have a giant switch statement handling WndProc messages, state would be held in tons of global variables, and everything crammed in to one huge file. Great for showing a concept and demonstrating how something works, not so good for developing a maintainable, reliable piece of software.

trollbridge

5 hours ago

Microsoft QuickC came with LIFE.C as a sample program. For DOS, although it would obviously run under Windows.