Yep. The first virus I wrote had a section that encrypted the rest of it, so it was impossible to trace, but better than that, the decryptor code changed, too

Unfortunately, a virus has to be small to be unnoticable (not so much nowadays though) so you can't have a large database of possible decryptors to use... In which case there still are some signatures it leaves. Plus, all the methods you find probably are already used. I set off my virus scanner several times

Damage: They are very dangerous. Speed is not essential. You should really be using a VM if you want to have a display: all the organisms will run in the same memory space.

Elver: Wow. You know there's an interrupt that when called, in all likeliness would have writtien over your partition table?

I like my opcodes still, (rather, my nodes) because they alow a lot of freedom, you can add more, the programisms have something more digitally alive rather than digital representations of biological creatures. (No, we shouldn't emulate something like anything biological).

[edit]
RedMarvin: The VM can't do anything dangerous.

Well, seeing as how that isn't a VM, my statement still holds.

What if your programs suddenly develop the ability to exploit a previously unknown bug in Windows and suddenly gain admin privileges?

Who needs exploits? Does Admin even do anything to programs? I'm certain there would be simple ways around it. And not unknown to microsoft. Of course, if you just run it in a VM, you DON'T HAVE THAT PROBLEM!!!

What if, like human will someday, discover something outside the vm and learn how to manipulate it muhahaha. It's kinda like how maybe humans will leave this unverse or something

Muhahaha, like, what i'm also implying is, what if there is a program called NEO! Will you, the architect simply reboot the matrix or what will happen.

Heh. This is kinda neat.

It doesn't really have to be a complete VM, it could just recognise 256 (anyone feeling creative?) assembly-esque commands. Or rather, recognise some primitive maths, memory handling, branching, and file IO.

Of course, this would all be restricted to an array malloc()ed by the VM, and either a folder or a disk image on the HD.

Should it multitask, and allow one Progranism to write to others' memory (ie access violate)? Or would an access violating program get terminated by the VM (as in a real system)?

Now, multiple threads are going to be hard when there is no one memory space for the programs. You'll bsically have a bunch of IPs all taking turns and such.

Have any of you guys heard of "Corewars"? It's a game where you write machine-code programs for a VM. All programs are run in a single memory-space. The idea is for your program to kill off all the other programs (by writing non-functioning op-codes in them IIRC) and survive the longest. The VM goes round giving each program a single opcode execution cycle before it goes on to the next program. These programs can spawn multiple processes, but when it's the program's execution cycle, only one of the process gets to execute it's opcode on that cycle (the other processes have to wait for the next cycle of the program).

On some implementations, the 'areana' (the memory where the competing programs are run) is shown graphically. Each program is given a different colour, and the instruction-pointer of the program or process is shown in a lighter shade of the colour.

I'm sure some good old Googling will bring you more information on Corewars and possible implementations for your platform.

AE.

I used to play Corewars at one point! Never was any good though.

It shouldn't be to hard to have a file that handles the 256 bytecode operations? You could go with a format something like this...
ABXXXXXXXXXX

A is the opcode
B is the Number of Following Bytes controled with that opcode (0-255)
X is a value that is used by that opcode....

Just make sure you write your programs in a hex editor, and your set!

And, in the future, you could double the number of supported opcodes by simply making the template like this...
AA

Shouldn't be too hard...

Ok, I'm not very good at opcodes and I am kinda new at it...

I've worked out a system that uses two opcode flags... I'll post my system when it is up.

Just tried you proganisms, and it seems cool. Didn't dare run them for more than one cycle, though, but still they managed to put a file named "~" on my desktop way cool, man!

I've got a question. Why does the parent's process never finish? Shouldn't it, or is the WinExec function blocking or something?
EDIT: WTF, it used to...