First of All: Claude helped a lot with this project. I stopped doing real programming 20 years ago, and I don't have the time to pick it up again at this level.

Back in the early 2000s, I was programming a screensaver for Windows. It was simple: a few bouncing balls that changed color when they collided. After two weeks and some progress, other things came up and I left it. In September, I wanted to give it a try, and one thing led to another and...

These are the Guguglitos, little creatures that eat, wander, mate and hunt. They can be herbivores, carnivores or omnivores. They have genes for traits such as color, vision, speed, sprint, fertility and some more. Circles are terrestrial, hexagons are amphibious, and drops are aquatic.
There are a lot of maps, and events happen in the simulation, like rainy seasons, droughts and gamma ray storms. A config file defines a lot of parameters for the simulation, so you're welcome to play with the values. But I can tell you, having a stable ecosystem is really hard. Events help you with that by adding new creatures if the population gets too low.

Pressing ESC ends the simulation, and useful stats and graphs are shown, like population distribution over time and which species was dominant.

I'm attaching a ZIP file and an IMG file for a floppy disk. There is an installer, but if you want to install it manually, just copy all the files to your hard drive, add the simulation path to your AUTOEXEC.BAT and ADD:

gglitos.com / <seconds> . So 180 will launch it after 3 minutes of inactivity. This is only if you want to use the screensaver mode, which uses around 500 bytes of memory.

If you want to launch it as a standalone program, run VIDA.exe. It will autodetect your PC and try to limit the simulation to a non-slideshow FPS.

The simulation parameters are in vida.cfg, and there are a few "modes" you can try.

As a result of testing, a benchmark was created, and it can be run with SCORE.BAT. You will get a Gugulito SCORE! A 286 12MHz with a WDC90C30 VGA gets 100 points, while an IBM 386SLC at 25MHz with a GD5422 gets 256 points.

I didn't add more features because I was stressing the 286 too much, and I wanted old PCs to be able to run this. This was a personal project, just for fun, and it's free to use. It's nice to see a DOS PC doing some interesting things while idle instead of just showing a blinking cursor.

You can launch the simulation in english with the /EN parameter , also the installer has the english option

VIDA101.ZIP : has all the files
VIDA101-IMG.ZIP has the image file for a diskette