Show HN: Conway's Game of Life in boot sector

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conways-game-of-life boot-sector x86 assembly low-level vga simulation

Summary

A project called BootLife implements Conway's Game of Life in a 512-byte x86 boot sector, using VGA memory for the simulation grid.

Hello HN!<p>On these weekends, I was sitting and thinking about where our industry is going, and how fun it was earlier, when we wrote more code than chat messages. The thoughts quickly turned into a wish to build something like we did earlier. In my case, it ended up as something much &quot;earlier&quot; than I had in mind initially...<p>So, Conway&#x27;s Game of Life running from a 512-byte x86 boot sector. Maybe you will find it interesting. I tried to comment the code as much as possible, which might be especially useful if you are learning assembly.<p>Have fun!
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0xAX/BootLife

Source: https://github.com/0xAX/BootLife

BootLife

Conway's Game of Life running directly from a 512-byte x86 boot sector, using VGA memory as the simulation grid.

Usage • Why • Contributing • Author

Size Platform Assembler License
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BootLife running in QEMU

Usage

To build and run bootlife you need:

Use the following commands to run it:

nasm -f bin -o life.img life.asm

qemu-system-i386 -drive file=life.img,format=raw,if=floppy

Or just:

make run

Why

Just for fun 💾

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome - see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Author

0xAX

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