SGB_01.net CORE WARS Steve's Guide for Beginners Iss 1 (v4) I am a beginner and I find all this Core Wars stuff VERY confusing, so I am writing this "guide" for my own use, to encourage CONSTRUCTIVE criticism and advice and as a possible aid to other beginners. Such a guide may already exist - in which case please point me at it. During these guides I will make statements that are incorrect in detail, but please don't correct them when the intent of the statement is for beginner simplicity. The bias is towards IBM PC compatibles. (I use a 486/66 running DOS 6 and Windows 3.1.) The line length is intentionally narrow to ease quoting. ====== Introduction: Some people will have a vague recollection of the concept of Core Wars from the Scientific American article around 1984. Most people have never heard of it. What is Core Wars? It is a game for 2 players. The field/board is a simulated small computer. The player's "piece" is a program. The objective is to corrupt your opponent's program so that it executes an illegal instruction. The field of play (the computer) is known as MARS which stands for "Memory Array Redcode Simulator". One common simulator is pMARS (p for portable). The programs written are "Warriors" and have names. ====== How to start? I started in rec.games.corewar. Most of the r.g.c. posts are technical gobbledegook, ignore them. Find the FAQ or references to the archives: ftp://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/corewar From there load down .../documents/tutorial.1.Z, .../documents/tutorial.2.Z and .../systems/pmars08.zip (which is PC executables) (don't download the sources pmars08s.zip) Create yourself a corewar directory (I'll refer to this as \COREWAR). Unpack the tutorials, merge them into one file (I called mine TUTORIAL.TXT) and put it in \COREWAR and read it. Unpack the zip file into \COREWAR then run your virus checker. (I renamed many files to ease my personal use - eg PMARS.DOC is now DOCN.TXT). (If you can't unpack .Z or .zip files, that is a separate matter beyond the scope of this guide.) From DOS, change to \COREWAR, type DIR. You will see 3 *.EXEs and some *.REDs. Just to prove you've done it right, type PMARSV to get the usage prompt. Next choose two *.REDs (I'll pick two as examples here) and type: PMARSV RAVE.RED AEKA.RED Watch it compile and splash pretty patterns on the screen. ====== You are up and running. Next issue will discuss what the patterns mean and what the *.REDs are. === Steve Bailey 101374.624@compuserve.com sgb@zed-inst.demon.co.uk http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/SGBailey Work: Electronics Play: Go 2kyu.