What is bootgol?

Bootgol is a tiny experimental project that turns a computer straight into a running simulation of Conway's Game of Life the moment it boots, with nothing else running underneath it. There is no operating system and no standard C library involved. Instead, a small bootloader hands control to a minimal C program that draws the simulation directly using an old low level video mode from the 1980s called VGA mode 13h. The author wrote a companion article explaining how the whole thing works, covering the bootloader, the switch into the CPU's protected mode, the small C kernel, how the screen is drawn, and the random number generator used to seed the starting pattern. The README notes plainly that this repository probably will not receive further updates, since it exists to share the code publicly rather than to be actively maintained, and suggests forking it if you want to keep developing it further. To build it, you run a single make command, which produces a raw disk image containing both the bootloader and the kernel together. You can test that image inside the QEMU emulator, or write it to a USB stick to boot it on real hardware using a provided flash command. The README includes a clear warning about that flashing step, since it writes directly to a raw disk device and pointing it at the wrong drive could overwrite an actual operating system disk. There is no configuration file or command line options. Every setting, such as the simulation speed, the specific rules for when cells live or die, the grid size, and how often new cells appear at random, is hardcoded near the top of the kernel's source file and requires editing the code and rebuilding to change. The core Game of Life logic is based on an existing implementation by another developer, released without a license, which was adapted here to run without a filesystem or standard input and output, and to draw to the VGA framebuffer instead of printing text. The project itself is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.