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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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