Download Life32 version 1.11

...from an FTP site in California:

...from an FTP site in Wisconsin:

...from an FTP site in Atlanta:

...from a web site in Germany:

Screenshot:

Features:

In short, Life32 is the best, fastest, and most user-friendly life player around. But if you need more convincing, here is a list of Features:

• 1 million x 1 million universe.
• Fastest Windows Life player; user-definable speed.
• Supports all popular Life file formats: Life 1.05/1.06, RLE, Xlife 2.0, dbLife, ProLife.
• Use of Microsoft DirectX to accelerate drawing, with seamless non-DirectX support (albeit that the latter is a lot slower). Variable rate frame dropping increases the speed further at the cost of smooth animation.
• Take a "snapshot" and revert to it in one keystroke. Advanced snapshot list maintenance.
• Skip to... option lets you skip to any generation fast. For skipping backward, Life32 skips forward from the preceding snapshot.
• User-definable rules, using checkboxes, text (23/3, etc.), or a list of known interesting rules with descriptions.
• Advanced editing features: cut and paste, drag and drop, etc. Cut and paste to and from text editors - good for e-mailing patterns.
• Zoom from 10 pixels per cell down to 1/32 sub-pixel. Zoom cursor for selective zooming. Zoom to fit using 'z' key.
• Scrollbars and keyboard shortcuts for moving around the universe easily; hand cursor for scrolling in all directions; Move to... window lets you jump to anywhere in the universe, or the edges of the pattern, or the center of the pattern.
• Keeps track of pattern descriptions: shows them to you in the "Open" windo before you open a pattern, allows you to change them in Settings or Save As, and view them with one click.
• Extensive on-line help.

Related downloads:

"Works best" is a vast understatement. Life32 is very efficient, which makes the Windows API a serious performance problem. DirectX is Microsoft's solution to such problems.

For Windows 95: You can download DirectX 6.1 for users from http://www.microsoft.com/directx/download.asp

For Windows 98: Silly you, DirectX is part of Windows-98. You should have skipped to the next section already.

For Windows NT 4.0: DirectX 3.0 comes in Service Pack 3. Download it from http://support.microsoft.com/support/downloads/LNP400.asp"

For Windows NT 5.0: As of the time of this writing, Windows NT 5.0 has not been released yet, but DirectX is promised as a standard component, just like in Windows-98.

To find out more about DirectX, visit http://www.microsoft.com/directx/resources/faq.htm

Life Patterns!

In order to make the most of Life, here are some pattern collections to get you started.

• Alan Hensel's great LifeP.zip collection. (205K)
• David Bell's huge dblifelib-2.tgz collection (312K), featuring many patterns in all kinds of evolution rules.
• New! If you are a real gun enthusiast (glider guns, that is), here is Dieter and Peter's collection Guns.zip (282K) of smallest guns with periods 100 < p < 1000 and their collection Guns2.zip (424K) of smallest guns with periods 1000 < p < 10,000. Note that these gun collections are in Dieter and Peter's ProLife format, so if you intend to use them with another Life program, you may have to convert them using Life32.

Other sites:

Life32 is written using Delphi 3.02. To find out more about Delphi, visit Inprise at www.inprise.com.
Johan is a member of the Dutch Pascal User group. Visit them at www.hcc-pgg.nl.

If you want to find out more about the Game of Life, visit the following sites:

• Paul Callahan's Life Page
• David Bell's site, where you can download his extensive articles (6 in total) about spaceships in Life.
• Alan Hensel's site, which also features a very fast Java Life player whose code was the base for Life32.
• David Griffeath's Primorial Soup Kitchen, which covers Conway's Life and many other related subjects.
• Another Life program, which isn't finished yet, is described on Arno Fehm's Life 2000 page (in German). I don't know of any other Life programs for 32-bit Windows.

Questions about Life32? Contact Johan Bontes.