CoreWin

Welcome to the CoreWin home page! CoreWin is a full-featured, GUI-based Core War simulator for Windows. Newcomers to the game of Core War will find it intuitive and easy to use, while experienced Core War programmers can use it as a serious development tool.

The current version of CoreWin is 2.3. These are some of the major features:

• Runs on any 32-bit Windows OS (Win95 or later)
• Full support of ICWS '94 standards, plus all modern extensions
• Built-in editor and Redcode compiler, with full support for multi-line equates, for/rof loops, and complex expressions
• Core sizes up to 130,000,000
• Colorful display graphics that automatically adjust to any core size
• Support for read-write limits
• Four kinds of tournament play:
  • Melee (all warriors battle simultaneously)
  • Challenge (one against each of the rest)
  • Round Robin (each against each)
  • Benchmark (each of one group against each of another group)
• Multiple core views, showing color-coded instructions, that update in real time
• P-space view, showing contents of p-space for any warrior
• Breakpoint support, including on-execute, on-write, conditional tests, and more
• Editable core contents, p-space contents, and process queues
• New in version 2.3: Max speed is 2.5 times faster than before
• New in version 2.3: Open or move core views with a single mouse click
• New in version 2.3: Unlimited number of warriors for any tournament type
• New in version 2.3: Control over warrior placements
• New in version 2.3: Custom core initialization instruction

• Gotta have it - don't read any further; go to the download page immediately.
• Yearning for more details - the online user's guide is for you. It goes into excruciating detail, with screenshots.
• Still burdened with questions that the user's guide didn't answer - try the CoreWin FAQ.
• Totally confused - find out more about the fascinating game of Core War by following these links:
  • The Corewar Info Page has up-to-date information, including tutorials, ongoing tournaments, and links to other sites.
  • KOTH (King of the Hill) contains some good beginner information and tutorials (somewhat out of date), a set of active hills, and many other links.

If you're looking for more competitive warriors, here are a few collections (in increasing order of sophistication and complexity):

• The Wilkies benchmark is a set of 12 warriors from the mid 1990's. They can serve as the first real test of new warriors.
• The WilMoo benchmark is a more advanced collection, dating from 1998.
• For a tough selection of recent warriors, try the WilFiz benchmark, on Fizmo's Corewar Info Page.
• A huge source of warriors published prior to 2001 is on Planar's site, which includes the infinite hill Mount Olympus.
• All published warriors eventually find their way onto the Koenigstuhl, a set of infinite hills (where each warrior battles every other). This is where you can find the best of the best.

Please email me at chipw(at)mdli(dot)com with any questions, comments, suggestions, or bug reports. If there are any features you would like to see added to CoreWin, by all means let me know! CoreWin is under active development, so your ideas may appear in a future release.