File formats

A variety of File Formats are used to store patterns.

This page is under construction.

name	description	etc
Macrocell (MC)	Commonly used for storing larger patterns than those stored in RLE format.
MCell	Introduced with MCLife 1.20 and continued in Mirek's Cellebration (MCell). It is an ASCII format combining both Life 1.05 and RLE and introducing extensions necessary to store all MCell features.
Life 1.05	An ASCII format for storing patterns by simply using dots (.) to represent dead cells and asterisks (*) to represent alive cells. This file format was designed to be easily ported; you can look at a pattern saved in this format in a text editor and figure out what it is. Life 1.05 files are saved with a .lif or .life file extension.
Life 1.06	An ASCII format that is just a list of coordinates of alive cells. Life 1.06 was designed to be easy and quick for a Life program to read and write, with the drawback being that the file size is very large for large patterns. Life 1.06 files are saved with a .lif or .life file extension.
Plaintext	Similar to Life 1.05, it stores patterns simply by representing dead and alive cells by different characters and "drawing" the pattern with those characters. Based on the format used by Edwin Martin's Game of Life program , which uses the .cells file extension.

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