Coneay's Game of Life

[gambler172]

Hi Guys

does anybody think,it would be possible to realize

Conway's Game of Life with 7800 Basic?

I saw some Basic listing,which is not too big

greetings Walter

Edited February 28, 2015 by gambler172

[Trebor]

Wow...Game of Life...Haven't seen that title in decades. I had the Golden Oldies (Vol. 1) from The Software Toolworks many moons ago for my XT. I enjoyed Adventure and Pong of course. Eliza was a throw back to the Apple II from when I first encountered it, and its 'psychological charms' were mildly interesting at the time, but lost my attention rather quickly. "Life" though seemed like some sort of random generator of color graphics.

 

From what I recall, you provided a number (of generations I think) and watched the 'art' grow or collapse in size which represented the population of people. The colors and designs seemed pretty cool and even made my measly 4-color CGA appear not too shabby (Or perhaps it utilized the Composite mode of my video card); regardless, I don't recall it being much of a game per se, but more of an art form, that reminded me much of a calypso color wheel-kaleidoscope:

 

 

Or am I missing something? It's been nearly 30 years since I last looked at it, so I may be forgetting some details.

[RevEng]

Not a game, as such. There's an up-front interactive aspect in trying to setup start conditions that will generate interesting patterns, but other than that it's a cellular automaton that you just watch.

 

I wrote a 4 color version of it for the 2600 a while back, complete with editor.

 

It could be done for the 7800, no doubt, and certainly with 7800basic. Using plotmap to display a bunch of character memory, and manipulating the memory with peekchar and pokechar would probably be the easiest way.

[EricBall]

While possible, the biggest difficulty is going to be memory to store the cell map as the 7800 doesn't have a true bitmap display. 160x200x2bpp = 8K and the 7800 only has 4K available.

[RevEng]

Sure, you'd need to stick to a coarser resolution than that to fit it into available memory. I did the same for my 2600 version, which used a 32x16 cell world.

 

It's not as constraining as it sounds, if you allow the cells' world to wrap around at the screen edges. I have built-in start-up configs that have large and small gliders flying across the screen and colliding with each other, and the resulting "explosions" go on for a large number of turns.

 

[edit] Or throw a CPUWIZ NVRAM cart at it, and then you can have 8k or more. As an added bonus, if you turn off the power and start again later, the simulation will pick up where it left off.

[gambler172]

Hi RevEng

would be great to see this on the 7800

[preetlove]

The title of the game " game of life" simply amaze. After read this title everyone try or would play this game. I have not seen title like this yet.

[mckafka99]

I can get engrossed with Conway's Game of Life for hours. I always wondered whether any of the consoles would have a version and I have tried the Xbox 360 version. However, I mainly use Golly on PC and on iPad to get my GoL fix.

 

http://golly.sourceforge.net

[danwinslow]

Cellular Automata, of which Conway's is an example, are easily doable in a small footprint, so my answer is yes, it could be done on a 7800. That said, I don't actually know anything about programming on a 7800, but if it can do some of the games I've seen it should be able to do many different kinds of Cellular Automata.

Edited July 23, 2015 by danwinslow