WinCA beta #2 Readme File ========================= Thank you for trying out the second beta version of WinCA, our Windows- based interactive platform for cellular automaton experimentation. This text file contains basic info about system requirements and installation. Program documentation, together with information about the current state of the beta, future plans and CA resources, now appears in the WinCA help file (winca.hlp). This second beta version of WinCA still does NOT permit user-defined rules, although that facility is central to the design of the program and our highest priority for future development. Rather, beta #2 comes with 8 pre-defined parameterized families of CA rules, each in its own .rul file. Two dozen annotated experiments illustrate these rules as well as the main features of the interface. There are even little MIDI tunes that you can turn on as accompaniment if you so desire and your machine has a sound card. (See the Installation section of the help file for instructions on how to change program preferences if your PC doesn't support a synth or if you want to disable this feature.) Our ultimate goal is to provide hooks so users can develop their own .rul's as painlessly as possible and "plug" them into WinCA. But since this is a technically tricky enterprise, we first need to ensure that the program core is bug-free and full-featured. Most of our efforts since beta #1 have been devoted to performance issues. The program is now substantially faster without in-line assembler code than it was previously with assembler. This will ensure satisfactory performance of user-defined rules without the headaches of asm optimization. For demonstration purposes, though, many of our nearest-neighbor rules are optimized. This enables the fastest of our demos to update an array of more than 20,000 cells in excess of 30 times per second on a fast 486. In addition, considerable functionality has been added to the interface, and a great many bugs from the first beta have been corrected. We are eager for feedback concerning the WinCA front end in this second version of the program. Those of you who report back with bugs and suggestions will be highest on our list for future updates that support and document rule development. Feel free to pass along the software to anyone you feel might be willing to participate in the beta testing. Thanks again for your help, Bob Fisch and David Griffeath February 1995 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS ------------------- WinCA is a resource-hungry Windows application. Thus it is designed for AT LEAST an MS/Intel 33 mhz 386 with 8MB RAM and 6MB free hard disk space, running MS Windows 3.1. Needless to say, it runs MUCH better on a 100 mhz 486 or Pentium with 16 MB RAM under Windows for Workgroups 3.11. (We plan to move to a 32-bit version sometime within the next year, which should provide a further boost to program performance.) IMPORTANT NOTE: =============== WinCA is a 256-color application. It will ONLY run if Windows is configured with a 256-color video driver. Anyone using Windows with 16 colors should permanently change to 256 (by running Windows Setup) for improved graphics capabilities. More to the point, though, WinCA will NOT run under most "hi-color" drivers (e.g. 32K, 64K or 16M colors per pixel). Unpredictable results, perhaps even a system crash, may result. Since newer Windows machines sometimes ship in hi-color mode, users should check their system configuration before running WinCA, and swap video drivers if need be. NEW IN THIS BETA: ================= WinCA now uses the Microsoft WinG graphics extensions to Windows 3.1/3.11. These are optimized graphics routines that dramatically improve the speed of screen display. They are already featured in many of the newest games for Windows and will be a standard component of Win95. So, as detailed below, users MUST install these system files in the windows\system directory if they are not already there. The immediate manifestation of the enhancement, if no previous WinG applications have been installed, is a timing routine upon WinCA startup. That procedure takes place only once for each display configuration (the results being written to system.ini). In some instances the WinG testing procedure may suggest that you update your screen drivers. One should probably take this advice seriously, not just to improve WinCA performance, but because these graphics extensions will be standard in future versions of Windows. The current beta will support 1024x1024 or larger CA arrays on a system with sufficient memory. The maximum range for neighbor sets is 99, i.e., a 199x199 lattice box centered at the updating cell. This limit is rather arbitrary; again memory limitations are the salient issue. See the Troubleshooting section of WinCA Help for further discussion of memory issues. INSTALLATION ------------ This readme file (winca.txt) and the beta #2 release (winca_b2.exe) are available by anonymous ftp to excite.math.wisc.edu OR cam8.math.wisc.edu (Be sure to switch to 'binary' before downloading the executable.) For the time being we do not have a completely automated WinCA setup, so once these two files have made their way to your Windows machine the installation requires a few easy steps: 0) If you have previously installed beta #1, then delete ALL files from that version. (There are various incompatibilities between the data structures of the previous version and the new one. So any custom experiments made with beta #1 should be reconstructed from scratch; this is a quick and easy process.) 1) Run the Windows self-extractor winca_b2.exe from a directory of your choosing. After reading the information screen, hit OK and then Unzip to install WinCA and its subdirectory structure of data files. The default location is c:\winca, but it's fine to substitute d:\winca (where 'd' is an alternate drive) in the relevant text box. Hit Close when the installation is complete. 2) IMPORTANT: Find the file bwcc.dll and 5 WinG support files (wing*.*), which should now be located in the \winca\system directory. If you do not already have copies of these files in your \windows\system directory (or if the ones we provide have more recent dates) then MOVE these files to windows\system. bwcc.dll contains the Borland custom controls used by WinCA; the program will not run without it. The 5 WinG files comprise Microsoft's graphics extensions to Windows for fast screen display. Since many other Windows applications also need these system files, windows\system is their proper place. Note that these are the ONLY files required by WinCA that do not reside in the \winca directory. Thus, to uninstall the program one need only delete \winca. 3) The WinCA executable \winca\winca.exe is now ready to run from Windows by any of the usual means (via 'Run..,' from File Manager, or from a group in Program Manager). We suggest creating a WinCA program icon in your favorite group with startup directory \winca. 4) Delete the winca\system subdirectory, and also delete winca_b2.exe unless you want to either save it for backup or pass it along to a prospective beta tester. WinCA makes use of two viewers: a text editor for Notes and a paint program for manipulating bitmaps. By default (in winca.ini) these are set as the Windows applets notepad.exe and pbrush.exe respectively. Neither program is very good. For instance, neither remembers its position on the desktop, so in vga mode both must be repeatedly maximized for use with WinCA. Also, notepad opens multiple copies of itself, while pbrush has annoying zoom and cut and paste behaviors. One can specify better replacements in the Preferences dialog. Suitable editors include deskedit (part of Norton Desktop), winedit (shareware) and the nice FREE Windows editor pfe (available as pfe0506.zip on excite). Some superior paint programs are mentioned below in the Future Enhancements section of winca.hlp; unfortunately we are not aware of good free software for pixel-level bitmap editing. In any case, make sure that WinCA finds two appropriate viewers somewhere on your machine. DOCUMENTATION ------------- Online documentation for the WinCA interface is provided in the Windows hypertext help file \winca\help\winca.hlp. This information can be viewed in 3 ways. For direct access you can double click on winca.hlp in File Manager. Or, with WinCA running, press the Help button on the Button Bar (or choose Index from the Help main menu item in Menu Mode). Finally, context-sensitive documentation is available within almost all of the panels and dialog boxes of WinCA by pressing the displayed Help button. In this second beta, documentation of the interface is reasonably complete, and preliminary versions of other sections of the help file describe installation and troubleshooting issues, plans for future enhancements, and locations of resource materials on the Internet. Future updates will also include a technical reference for the creation of user-defined rules. The default setup of WinCA is button-based and menuless. Users who prefer menus (at least while learning a new program) can turn the menu on from the Preferences dialog. See the Preferences help entry for details. FEEDBACK -------- Kindly contact us with questions, bug reports, enhancements requests, or any other feedback, by e-mail to griffeat@math.wisc.edu. Web users can send feedback via the cook's page of the Primordial Soup Kitchen: http://math.wisc.edu/~griffeat/cook.html Thanks again, RF&DG