Back when I had my Apple IIGS, there was a cool program called PlasmaLab, and it had a bunch of weird Cellular Automatons bundled together in one little program. Most of them were pretty bland, but the WireWorld module intrigued me. However, it was hit with many annoying limitations: a small arena in which to run things, an inability to draw straight lines without an intense amount of pain, and so forth. It was, however, very cool all the same, and I spent many hours with it. Then came my Quadra 610, and my advent into learning how to program for the Macintosh. After one aborted attempt, I moved on to other things for a while, then tried my hand again. I got the inital version working, from scratch, in one, frantic, 4-hour coding session.

As the months went on, I optimized it extensively, sat on it, forgot about it, and eventually entered it in the UW-Stout software fair and won first prize, at which point I promptly sat on it and did almost nothing in terms of improvements. Drawn by other projects, I've let it sit for a half-year.

So, this is my gift to the Mac community. It has bugs and problems which I don't have the time or energy to try to fix, but nothing extensively major. It should provide a bit of fun for someone, and maybe teach someone a thing or two about programming.

I do some pretty hairy stuff in my attempt to make things run fast. (And then I go and blit the entire offscreen every frame, lovely.) It was really optimized for direct-to-screen operation, but that gets a bit scary. It should work fine on 68k machines, except that I don't have any 68k compilers installed on my computer at the moment. If you really, really, REALLY need a 68k version and are unable to build a copy for yourself or find someone who can, ask me. Likewise, if you are trying to unravel my strange code, ask me. However, WireWorld is far from my primary focus, so I might not get a response out in a particularly timely manner.

Now for the semi-legal stuff.

The contents of this archive are entirely in the public domain, barring anything that might be owned by people other than myself. (I don't *think* there's any of that....) You may do whatever you please with these contents or any derivatives of these contents that you make, including selling them.

You may download the archive here.