John Conway's Game of Life

   
Release: 5.1
Date: 20 Apr 2003
O/S: All Windows 9x and NT versions (inc. XP, Vista & Windows 7)

Overview

This open source program demonstrates John Conway's Game of Life on a 21×21 grid.

Rules for cellular automata other than the Game of Life can also be created and used.

This version of Game of Life was originally written as a DOS programming exercise using Turbo Pascal. It's one of my oldest surviving programs. I eventually converted to it to an object-oriented Windows 3.1 program using Delphi 1 when I was first learning Delphi and OOP. I finally did a quick and dirty conversion of the program to native 32 bit Windows in 2003 using Delphi 4 Pro. However, the user interface still has a rather garish Win 3.1 feel to it!

Warning re Windows Vista & Later OSs
This program writes configuration data to the program folder. This is not permitted in Program Files on Windows Vista and later so you are advised to install somewhere outside the Program Files folder, for example in C:\Life.
Furthermore, the program's help system will not work by default on Vista and later because it uses the now unsupported WinHlp32 system. You can download a suitable copy of WinHlp32 from Microsoft. See the Microsoft Knowledge Base article KB917607 for details.