0xAX/BootLife

Conway's Game of Life running directly from a 512-byte x86 boot sector, using VGA memory as the simulation grid.

Hardware, IoT & roboticsAssembly#assembly#bootsector#bootsector-game

1.6 Cooling Magnitude out of 10 — how fast interest is growing, not a quality score. Star growth looks organic. Data as of September 24, 2026, 23:23 UTC.

Open on Seismograph Open on GitHub

About the project

Conway's Game of Life written in assembly and fitting into a 512-byte x86 boot sector; the simulation grid is VGA video memory. It runs directly from BIOS without an operating system.

Useful for

Build the image with nasm and run it in QEMU as a floppy disk
Study an example of VGA memory and boot sector programming in assembly

README summarized by DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Details may be inaccurate.

Why it’s trending

2 stars today.
The repository is 4 days old and already has 56 stars. With less than two weeks of history, there's no usual pace to compare the spike against yet.
Hacker News: “Show HN: Conway's Game of Life in boot sector” — 27 points, 3 days ago.

Stars per day

Bars are daily stars, the line is the usual pace. Red marks spike days.

Numbers

Total stars: 56
Today: 2
Forks: 5
Issues and pull requests: 0
Watchers: 0
Language: Assembly
License: ISC
Created: September 20, 2026
Last push: September 21, 2026

Star trust

Growth looks organic: forks and discussion are in line with active projects, and stars arrive unevenly, the way people give them.

These are heuristics, not a verdict: we judge by the repository’s behavior, not by a list of stargazers.

Hacker News discussions

Show HN: Conway's Game of Life in boot sector27 points, September 21, 2026

Spotted in

September 24, 2026Spotted on Hacker News
September 23, 2026Spotted on Hacker News

README badge

Paste it into your README — the badge shows the current magnitude and links to this page.

[![Seismograph](https://gitnova.dev/badge/0xAX/BootLife.svg?lang=en)](https://gitnova.dev/en/r/0xAX/BootLife)

More in this category

4.8
xCuri0/ReBarUEFI
UEFI DXE driver that enables Resizable BAR on systems without official support. Provides GPU performance gains and is required for Intel Arc GPUs to work optimally.

BreakoutHardware, IoT & roboticsC+10 stars today
3.8
General-Instinct/InstinctFlash
A high-performance serving runtime for robotics models (VLA, WAM, policies) with FP8 acceleration and optimized kernels on Jetson Thor and RTX 4090/5090.

Early signalHardware, IoT & roboticsC+++11 stars today
3.2
hsfzxjy/npunlock
A toolkit for writing and running custom C kernels on Intel Core Ultra NPUs, bypassing the public graph-level-only stack. It reconstructs the path from C code to a runnable NPU kernel, verified on Windows x64 with…

Early signalHardware, IoT & roboticsC+5 stars today
2.8
ruvnet/RuView
A Rust WiFi-sensing platform that uses CSI data from cheap ESP32 boards to detect presence, breathing, heart rate, activity and pose without cameras or wearables. Runs locally on edge hardware with Home Assistant,…

SteadyHardware, IoT & roboticsRust+63 stars today
2.2
pollen-robotics/microduck
Firmware and system software for Microduck, a tiny biped duck robot on a Rockchip RK3566 that walks, rolls and gets up using neural policies. The repo contains daemons for motor control, updates, Bluetooth, gamepad and…

SteadyHardware, IoT & roboticsRust+18 stars today
2.1
RomanSlack/jev-drone
An autonomous quadrotor in MuJoCo that flies an obstacle course using only its onboard camera, with a small Jev judgment model making tactical calls at ~2.5 Hz while control and safety stay in ordinary code.

SteadyHardware, IoT & roboticsPython+12 stars today