This is a fairly simple implementation of Conway's Game of Life, written in Fortran 77 for the Open Watcom compiler on FreeDOS, but which also compiles on GFortran on Linux.
Note - the image above shows an older version which does not clear screen between frames.
On FreeDOS, install the Open Watcom Fortran compiler, download the repository and then compile the code by running wmake. Optionally, you can also compile a tool for displaying PBM files by running wmake show.exe.
On Linux, you can compile the code with gfortran by running make -f Makefile.gnu. You can also build the show utility, but you are better of using basically any other image viewer.
There are also makefiles for Intel Fortran (Makefile.if) and Nvidia Fortran (Makefile.nv). Neither of these currently support Braille output.
(Testing has shown that the Linux version of life.exe compiles successfully under Cygwin, the only downside being font support in MinTTY).
There is a special Linux version if your font has braille characters, which can be run by running life.braille.
To run the code, run life.exe <inputfile> for some input PBM file. Some examples can be found in the input directory.
The program will draw the file into the terminal, move forward a generation with each press of the Enter key. Press ctrl-c, Enter to quit (the last Enter is not necessary on Linux).
Here is the output when run on Linux (note, you need a Unicode supporting terminal):
Here is the output of the braille version:
