Conway's Game of Life in boot sector
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Hello HN!On these weekends, I was sitting and thinking about where our industry is going, and how fun it was earlier, when we wrote more code than chat messages. The thoughts quickly turned into a wish to build something like we did earlier. In my case, it ended up as something much "earlier" than I had in mind initially...So, Conway's Game of Life running from a 512-byte x86 boot sector. Maybe you will find it interesting. I tried to comment the code as much as possible, which might be especially useful if you are learning assembly.Have fun!
HN · launched Sep 21, 2026 · 27 upvotes (top 22%) · 0 views
Niche: simulation games · 118 launches, 10 in the last 7 days ▼ -44% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
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More like this: all 118 launches in simulation games →
Could you build this?
Partial Fitting Conway's Game of Life into a 512-byte x86 MBR boot sector requires extreme assembly golf and raw BIOS interrupt knowledge that LLMs frequently hallucinate or fail to optimize sufficiently.
What it would actually take: The implementation is written in 16-bit real-mode x86 assembly (NASM) designed to fit precisely within 510 bytes plus the 2-byte 0xAA55 boot signature. The challenge lies in managing extreme memory constraints, directly manipulating VGA video memory (Mode 13h or Mode 03h text mode), and computing toroidal neighbor counts within tens of CPU instructions without OS services or standard library abstractions.
Discussion
4 comments analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 218 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #68 of 219 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 327 days after the earliest competitor.
- BootLife · github · 2026-09-20 · 55 upvotes · similarity 0.67
- A language model that lives in a boot sector · hn · 2026-10-31 · 107 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Run Conway's Game of Life in CSS · hn · 2026-11-03 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- deadSPEAKER, inc. · hn · 2026-09-15 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Aurion OS · hn · 2026-03-12 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Fatal Core Dump · hn · 2026-03-14 · 68 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Our space game has a built-in RISC-V emulator that runs Linux · hn · 2026-10-02 · 94 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- bc250-memory-timing-boot-fix · github · 2026-09-13 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.41
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