Life game for OSI recovered

[Mark]

I heard John Horton Conway passed this week, he is known as the creator of the Game of Life in 1970, an early example of cellular automation.
BillDrom contacted me with his archive of an OSI tape and documentation for an OSI440 version of Life, published as tables of hex data in an early OSI Publication.
I was able to decode the tape and recover the program. I modified it to work on OSI C1P and OSI C2/C4/C8. There was a surprising amount of code packed in the less than 2K program, along with bits and pieces of code from other versions laying about. I created an assembler listing and moved the code around to fit better with later systems without changing too much. I was surprised to find it even has a way of loading and editing predefined starting states, which were included with the original listing. The original version relied on an ASCII keyboard (or serial terminal) to poll when characters were ready, I've kludged a way around that for the C2/C4 BASIC in ROM machines.

I've created an archive with the original OSI440 data, along with C1/C4 versions and WAV files for cassette users. It's on my web page and attached here if you are interested.
See below:

Running OSILife

osi-life.gif (327.2 KiB) Viewed 4262 times

The archive with the PDF is too large (2.5MB) for here, but you can get the full package here (recommended). Or the package without the PDF docs here.

OSILifeXdoc.zip

OSI Life prog and src minus PDF scans

(213.26 KiB) Downloaded 594 times

Thanks Bill!
(Dave feel free to grab any files for your archive!)

[billdrom]

Thanks for posting this and all your work making it usable again.
I always like to see early software saved from being lost to the community.
Great work making it usable for non 440 video boards.
Kudos!

Bill