VieIII / 2020-09-12 07:13:44

What's That About?

The Game of Life is a famous and popular 2D cellular automaton invented by Dr. John Horton Conway, who sadly died of COVID-19 on April 11th, 2020. In the 90s, my very first, real Amiga program was a Game of Life called Vie (life in French), which I had improved until releasing VieIII on Aminet on July 18th, 1996 .

There are actually many, many, implementations of Conway's Game of Life and other such cellular automata. Shorty after Conway's death, Desire released a version of the Game of Life for MS-DOS in... 32 bytes! (Yes, bytes... no Kb or Mb... See on YouTube) On Amiga, besides VieIII, there is only the amazing VisualEasel, allows implementing and running any (?) kind of cellular automata by defining your own rules and creating your own worlds.

VieIII

Originally compiled with SAS/C, I was recently porting it to VBCC, which is a more modern compiler that works well with the great Cubic IDE . The porting was not too difficult but made me realised that my code, at the time!, was very coupled... maybe because SAS/C allowed including C files, which I mindlessly abused at the time .

Now, I separated better the different C files, added some headers to expose and share few variables and many functions, and it compiles and runs again! I uploaded the new version in Aminet, including a new pattern in memoriam of Dr. Conway from XKCD...