Corewar is a 19 Coding School project. The purpose of this project is an implementation of the programming game “Core War”.
• Corewar is a very peculiar game. It’s about bringing “players” together around a “virtual machine”, which will load some “champions” who will fight against one another with the support of “processes”, with the objective being for these champions to stay “alive”.
• The processes are executed sequentially within the same virtual machine and memory space. They can therefore, among other things, write and rewrite on top of each others so to corrupt one another, force the others to execute instructions that can damage them, try to rewrite on the go the coding equivalent of a Côtes du Rhône 1982 (that is one delicious French wine!), etc...
• The game ends when all the processes are dead. The winner is the last player reported to be “alive”.
Wikipedia ("Core War"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War
corewar.en.pdf is the task file.
Sebastien De Spiegeleer: Team Lead, VM (workflow, visualisation, parsing), Champion
Charles-Antoine Van Beers: VM (workflow, operations)
William Brakckman: ASM compilator (finite automaton lexer + parser + translator)
Nathan Rouvroy: Online Game (server, client)
This project can be broken down into three distinctive parts:
• The assembler: this is the program that will compile your champions and translate them from the language you will write them in (assembly language) into “Bytecode”.Bytecode is a machine code, which will be directly interpreted by the virtual machine.
• The virtual machine: It’s the “arena” in which your champions will be executed. It offers various functions, all of which will be useful for the battle of the champions. Obviously, the virtual machine should allow for numerous simultaneous processes; we are asking you for a gladiator fight, not a one-man show simulator.
• The champion: This one is a special case. Later, in the championship, you will need to render a super powerful champion, who will scare the staff team to death. However, rendering this kind of champion is serious work. And since, for now, we are mostly interested in your capacity to create Corewar’s other programs (i.e. the assembler and virtual machine), your current champion will only need to prove to us that you can write bits and pieces of Corewar ASM. This means that the champion you should render for this project only needs to scare the bejesus out of a neurasthenic hedgehog.
This project consists of five parts:
- Champion
- Assembler
- Virtual Machine
- Online Game (Bonus)
- Visualizer (Bonus)
Project has one developed champion: pod.s. It is located at the root directory.
Assembler is the program asm.
Virtual Machine + Visualizer are modules of the program corewar.
Online game is combined by server and client programs.
If you want to clone it, you can use the following command:
git clone https://github.com/sdespie/corewar.git
Clone repository and then go into the created directory and run the following command:
make
Tested on OS X 10.11. Requires ncurses to be installed.
Usage: ./asm (champion.s)
Usage: ./corewar [-dump nbr_cycles] [-visu] [-sounds] [[-n number] champion1.cor ...]
-dump nbr_cycles:
Dumps memory after nbr_cycles then exits.
-visu :
Use the visual mode to display the battle, live.
-sounds :
Use sounds mode to add special effect to the battle.
-n number :
Set the number of the following champion to number.
Usage server: ./server
Usage client: ./online [IP SERVER] [Champion.cor]
The best visualizer performance is with iTerm2.