ECA-SDL-C

A practice project to learn C and SDL by making a Elementary Cellular Automata

Note: This program was primarly made to run on Windows 10 so there is no guarantee that it will run on other operating systems.

Requirements

• gcc (For compiling)
• SDL2 (For graphics)

Note: For SDL2 the Makefile assumes that SDL2's include and lib files are in a folder called src in the root directory of the project

• Make (For building)

How to install

There are various was to install the required libraries for different operating systems but I am gonna outline how to install them on Windows 10

• gcc (For compiling)
  • Follow the guide by VSCode to configure gcc on Windows https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/cpp/config-mingw
• SDL2 (for graphics)
  • Go to https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases/latest and download the development libraries for Windows (It would be named something like SDL2-devel-2.30.4-mingw.tar.gz)
  • Go to your Download folder or wherever you downloaded the file and run tar -xvzf SDL2-devel-2.30.4-mingw.tar.gz -C SDL2 to extract the files
  • Go to the SDL2 folder and go to x86_64-w64-mingw32 and copy the include and lib folders to a folder called src in the root directory of the project
  • Also go to the SDL2 folder and go to x86_64-w64-mingw32/bin and copy the SDL2.dll file to the root directory of the project
• Make (For building)
  • After following the guide by VSCode to configure gcc on Windows you should open the terminal of MSYS2 and run pacman -S make to install make
  • Now make is installed but we need to add it to the path so we can access it outside of the MSYS2 terminal
  • Find the make.exe file usually located in ({Disk}:MSYS2\usr\bin)
  • Add it to the path by going to the environment variables and adding the path to the make.exe file

How to run

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/Arisamiga/ECA-SDL-C.git .

2. Run make in the root directory to build the c file

make

3. Run ./main.exe to run the program

./main.exe

How to use

• The program will run and display the "109" rule. If you want to change the rule you can add it as the first argument when executing the main.exe file

./main.exe 109

• The program will display the rule 109

Code and bug reporting

You can open a issue at https://github.com/Arisamiga/ECA-SDL-C/issues