Game_of_Assembly
Implementation of Conway's Game of Life in NASM 64 x86 assembly

Prerequisites:

• Tool ImageMagick for creating a gif out of the created animation-pictures:
  sudo apt install imagemagick
• System running (debian-based) linux with Intel 64bit x86 architecture.

Usage:

Creating the animation with its animation pictures: main <field-width> <field-height> <amount of generations>
Creating a gif from the created animation pictures: make animation
To clean the folder from all executables, the build folder and any animation pictures, you may use make clean.
One-liner example for creating the animation pictures and the gif file: main 30 30 300 && make animation && make clean

Until further notice, the start (first generation) of the animation is hardcoded into the code at field_handler:configure_field. A way of editing the start of the animation may be added in future implementations!

Building:

To build the project use the provided Makefile with the command make. The program runs only on Intel 64bit x86 architecture! Also it was only tested on Ubuntu and will most likely not work on Windows (- I mean why should it, its Windows. What do you expect?)

Code Conventions:

Function calls

• Every function call uses the x84-64 System V ABI calling convention for parameter passing, as well as for returning return values
• Every function is preceeded with at least one comment specifying the exact parameters to pass into and the exact return value it returns with in the form of (<parameters>)[<return values>] like so:
  (listOf[<C-type> <purpose-tag> @ <register/address>, ...])[<C-type> <purpose-tag> @ <register/address>]
  Additional comments ... yea. maybe

Stack

• The stack of each function is aligned as mod 16. We do this by using this special stack alignment prolog:

  push    rbp
  mov     rbp, rsp
  and     rsp, -16

  (For the haters and/or lovers of steal-clean assembly - i dont care and see x64 Assembly Language by Jeff Duntemann: chapter 12 - stack alignment)
  (For the people who are missing the enter instruction, see here why)

Future ToDo's:

• ✅ Full replacement of glibc, including glibc functions, startup-code (_start, __libc_start_main, ...) and cleanup-code.
  
• ✅ Implementation of custom stdout buffer management and improvement of already implemented mini-memory-allocator in core.lib.asm.
  
• ❌ Implementation of a function capable of taking a user-input and set this as the start of the animation.