July 14, 2026
Silicon gladiators enter the chat
Dmars – A modern Core Wars toolchain
Old-school code battles are back, and nostalgia fans are absolutely losing it
TLDR: dmars brings a beloved 1980s code-fighting game back in modern form, with browser play and faster large-scale battles. The comments instantly turned nostalgic and competitive, with fans treating the revival like a sacred comeback and already arguing about the ultimate warrior.
A blast from the geeky past just strutted back onto the internet runway: dmars, a modern remake of the classic 1980s programming battle game Core War, where tiny code fighters try to knock each other out inside a shared memory arena. The creator, holliplex, showed up with a full love letter to the original tool, saying the project was "close to my heart" and built for maximum faithfulness to the old favorite, pMARS. Translation for normal humans: this is retro computer combat, rebuilt so it works beautifully today, even in your browser.
And yes, the community reaction is the real show here. The strongest mood by far is pure nostalgia with a side of reverence. This isn’t just another coding toy to longtime fans; it’s apparently sacred text. But the thread also immediately swerved into wonderfully nerdy chaos when one commenter asked the question that launched a thousand imagined battles: could anyone run Mythos to create the absolute best "AI" warrior? That one comment basically turned the vibe from "aww, what a lovely retro revival" into fight night for code gremlins.
The humor is delightfully specific: people are treating these little self-modifying programs like gladiators, racehorses, and evil robot pets all at once. The drama isn’t angry internet drama so much as competitive nostalgia drama—the kind where everyone sounds one step away from dusting off a decades-old strategy and insisting their digital goblin could still dominate the arena. In short: old code, new shine, and commenters already trying to crown a king
Key Points
- •dmars is a Rust reimplementation of pMARS, the canonical Core War toolchain.
- •Its assembler supports the full ICWS'94 preprocessor and produces byte-compatible load files with `pmars -A`.
- •The simulator can run assembled warriors, optionally enforce ICWS'88 restrictions, and compile the same core to WebAssembly for browser use.
- •The article says dmars roughly matches pMARS in single-battle performance and is significantly faster for many battles by parallelizing where possible.
- •The project provides shell installation, Cargo support, pre-built GitHub binaries, and CLI commands for assembling, running, and interactively watching battles.