Portable MARS is the official Core War simulator of the ICWS and the rec.games.corewar newsgroup. pMARS serves as a test bed for new Redcode standards and tournament styles. It has also been used in genetic algorithm experiments and as an assembly language teaching aid. pMARS is under active development by a group of Core War enthusiasts who put a lot of time into this project.
If you are going to be running pMARS on a DOS or Windows machine, don't forget to download pSHELL also, it's incredibly helpful.
Latest versions of pMARS:
- Download from the source code for the latest version from the Corewar Sourceforge project page.
- SDL pMARS is Joonas Pihlaja's port of pMARS. Source code and a Windows binary are available.
Alternative MARS Software:
- CoreWin 2.3 is a MARS for Windows, programmed by Chip Wendell.
- nMars - A .NET implementation of MARS with IDE, under LGPL.
- Harald's A.R.E.S. is a Core War simulator for Windows with a number of extensions.
- Brian Haskin's Java Core War simulator: jMARS.
Older versions of pMARS:
- pMARS for Win95/98/NT.
- Nandor Sieben compiled this version.
- I've used it succesfully under Win95 and Win98. Just make sure you put your DOS shell window into full screen mode before running it.
- pMARS for Win95/98/NT.
- Phil Knight compiled this version.
- The zip contains a font file which needs to reside either in the directory from where the program is run or the directory specified by the GRXFONT environment variable.
- pMARS for DOS. (386 and higher)
- pMARS for DOS. (286 and lower)
- pMARS for Macintosh. (Macintosh Readme File)
- pMARS for Amiga. (Amiga Readme File)
- pMARS source v0.8.6. This is a new version which should be faster on x86 machines. (tar.Z archive)
- pMARS source v0.8.0. (INFO-zip archive)
- pMARS source v0.8.0. (tar.Z archive)
- Source for the Macintosh GUI.
Software to Evolve Warriors:
- Yace is an efficient evolver written by Martin Ankerl.
- Barkley Vowk has developed the CCAI and JNSL evolvers.
- Terry Newton has written several evolvers, REBS, Fizzle and Redmaker.
- RedRace is software to evolve warriors written by Dave Hillis.
- Loren Jamison wrote the Corewar Redcode Evolver software.
Other Core War Software:
- Accessory programs (pShell, MTS, ..). pShell is very useful.
- Perl program for generating p^3 redcode snippets. What is p^3? Need Perl?
- TestWarrior. A warrior benchmarking program for WindowsNT/95 created by Phil Knight.
- Corewar Tournament. Allows round robin tournaments of multi warrior battles, created by Phil Knight.