Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Coding STEM Uncategorized

Throwback to God in ’95

Hello again! I was going through my floppy disks (what’s that?) in my vault and re-discovered many of my older software programs I wrote for fun, education and some were actually sold worldwide (one native DOS program and several Windows applications complete with installation, help and all). This one’s a relatively tiny program that’s big in my heart for some strange reason.

Loosely based on the concept of Life. I coded this in C/C++ primarily for learning while a student and also for fun. The idea is male-female in adjacent cells make a baby (random gender) if there’s a blank cell in-between in the grid. If there is, the baby will mature to be a M/F. (Note the extended ASCII symbols used for M and F and infants in red).

While the parents will age and die after some cycles. If there’s over-crowding, there’s violence which results in deaths == available blank cells. And so the cycle goes forever. There’s no end until you quit! You can watch the real-time stats on its screen.

Watch it in action below…

(There’s some fixes in metrics I see I can improve but it was back in 1995 and I moved on to more complex DOS applications and then to Windows, but this little program still fascinates me).

Still runs like a champ on Windows 10 console as-is. I think going over the concept and code would be a great educational material for STEM students or anyone wanting to learn programming.

If you’re interested in getting the .EXE or the source, you may contact me. Cheers!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back To Top
+