How to play Video Life online
Video Life uses both joysticks: the left one for drawing and the right one for running the simulation. In the emulator these are the Player 1 and Player 2 controls.
- Move the cursor: arrow keys (the dot moves one space, pauses, then keeps going, so you can place it precisely)
- Draw and erase dots: Space bar (the left fire button)
- Start the evolution: A (the right fire button)
- Pause: press any of T/F/G/H (moving the right joystick)
- Step one generation at a time: hold one of T/F/G/H and tap A
- Clear the screen: hold F12 (Reset) for a few seconds
- Faster updates: F4 (left difficulty A), at the cost of some flicker
- Freeze the magnifier: F9 (right difficulty A)
With both difficulty switches on B, the cartridge first plays a built-in demonstration. The Select switch is not used.
How it works
The screen is a grid of 96 by 80 cells, and the edges wrap around. Besides the grid you see a generation counter, the cursorās position and a magnified window showing the area around the cursor. Each generation, every cell looks at its eight neighbours:
- A dot with fewer than two neighbours dies of loneliness.
- A dot with four or more neighbours dies of overcrowding.
- A dot with two or three neighbours survives.
- An empty cell with exactly three neighbours gets a new dot.
From these simple rules come stable blocks, blinking oscillators, and āglidersā that crawl across the screen. The manual walks through these classic shapes. When the magnifier is frozen, you can copy the pattern in it onto the grid by holding the right joystick and pressing the left fire button.
Things to try
- Draw a glider (the classic five-dot pattern) and watch it travel across the wrapping screen.
- Try the R-pentomino, a five-dot shape that keeps changing for a surprisingly long time.
- Use single steps to see exactly why a pattern dies or grows.
History
Mathematician John Horton Conway devised Life in 1970, and Martin Gardner made it famous in his Scientific American column. CommaVidās manual proudly points out that the cartridge was more powerful than some of the computers used to explore Life a decade earlier. The game is credited to John Bronstein, with design work by Irwin Gaines and Joseph Biel. It was never sold in shops: CommaVid offered it by letter only to people who owned its Magicard programming cartridge, and fewer than 500 copies are believed to exist.
