This is a simple implementation of Life that I wrote just to see how fast it would run on a PowerMac. It is supposed to look like bacteria cells in a Petri dish (pretend they are your favorite bacteria).
Basically, this is all there is:
Go sets things into motion.
Stop stops them.
Clear clears the dish.
Random puts new random cells in the dish.
Step steps you forward one generation.
Autoregenerate calls Random when a static state is detected.
You can draw your own cells onto the screen by clicking and dragging.
The dish can be saved to disk as a document and read back later.
The dish wraps around, top-to-bottom and right-to-left.
Life is fat binary: native code for both 68020+ and PowerPC. It requires System 7 or later but is happiest with System 7.5 or System 7 with the Thread Manager (Thread Manager is not required).
It runs faster on smaller screens.
It runs about twice as fast in black and white as in 8-bit color.
It runs 4 to 8 times faster on PowerMacs vs 68K Macs.
The rules:
1. If a cell has more than three neighbors it dies.
2. If a cell has less than two neighbors it dies.
3. If a location has exactly three neighbors and no cell, a new cell is born there.
A few common shapes:
ÑÑÑ blinker
Ñ
Ñ glider - moves 1 step / 4 generations
ÑÑÑ
ÑÑ
ÑÑ block
ÑÑ
Ñ Ñ beehive
ÑÑ
Ñ
ÑÑÑ turns into traffic lights in 9 generations
ÑÑ
ÑÑ the genesis particle
Ñ
PS: If you can make some good shapes, like a working glider gun, upload them somewhere or e-mail them to me.
PPS: This program was inspired by Bill Atkinson's original Life program which blew me away when I first saw it running on a 128K Mac ten years ago.
Life is copyrighted by me but is free in the public domain. Please include this document if you distribute it. If you would like to include it in a PD or CD-ROM collection, e-mail me at BobFron@aol.com.