LIFE

by J.W. Joyce



In case you were wondering, this program doesn't actually bring your

Spectrum to life as such. What it does do, though, is a very passable

impression of the ancient game of Life which has been around on

computers more or less since they were first invented. In fact, if you

bought an original rubber- keyed Spectrum you may well have got a

version of this thrown in. But JW's version is miles better than

anything you'll have seen before.



So just what is the meaning of Life? Well, apart from an excuse for

lots of crap 'life' gags, it's a sort of game thing that was invented

in 1970 by John Conway of Cambridge University (it says here). The

screen is divided up into lots of cells which you have to pretend are

alive. Although their initial layout is decided by you, the computer

then takes over and makes them grow or die out according to the

following rules - every live cell that has either two or three

neighbours will survive 'til the next generation, all other cells will

die, and a new cell will be born in any space which has precisely

three live neighbours. As time passes your 'colony' will develop into

lots of spooky patterns, eventually either dying out or becoming stable.



Right, time to type it in. The first thing to do is to type in the Hex

using the Hex Loader and save it to tape. You'll notice a couple of

Basic programs as well, but these are non- essential and can be

ignored for now.



This version of the game is different from others because it treats

every pixel on the screen as a cell, rather than having huge chunky

cells. This means you're able to create much more complicated patterns

than usual, and it also opens up a wide range of possibilities

regarding the initial layout of the cells. The only thing is, there

isn't actually a 'screen designer' routine as such, like you usually

get with Life games. But you don't actually need one. Because the

program uses the hi-res screen to generate its patterns; all you've

got to do is draw some things on the screen (using the PLOT, DRAW and

CIRCLE commands, for example) and run the program on them. You could

even bring a screen full of text to life, like a program listing. And

that's where the two Basic programs come in. They simply draw patterns

on the screen and then animate them using the Life routine.



To get it going then load in the Hex that you saved previously with

LOAD "" CODE, draw some things on the screen and then repeatedly

RANDOMIZE USR 42249 to update it. The Basic demos should clarify

things if you're not too sure.