README

sdllife - by Jeremy Allen

Background
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The algorithm used is from Michael Abrash' Graphics Programming Black Book. This project was primarily to prototype code that will ultimately be used on an Arduino 16x16 Matrix display. However, I enjoyed hacking on this and figured I would release a modern version of Abrash's algorithm. This is probably one of the speediest implementations you will find with no fancy data structures. (Caveat: this is a very clear implementation. Game of Life has been studied extensively and there are a lot of great and fast implementations, I like this algorithm for its simplicity and ability to run at > 60 fps on rather large boards on my machine with no real optimization)

Requirements
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You will need SDL >1.2.0, SDL_gfx, SDL_ttf. These are available on Ubuntu as standard packages. Both of these build under windows using MinGW and the makefile and code runs properly on both Linux and Windows. 

Usage
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When the game is running the following commands can be issued via keypress or mouse click

r - Clear the current cells and create a new board
c - Clear the current cells
p - Pause the game
- - Speed the game up
+ - Slow the game down
q - Quit