Every thread needs a creative title.

Lately, between track and homework for the AP tests, I have had almost no time to program. So I decided to start programming during school in Mimas. I decided to do Conway's Game of Life because I saw the demo for the Prizm and it looked like it would be fun to use. So I've been working on this during school for about two weeks now and finally today, it actually worked. Although, I probably would have finished this way sooner if I could have used a debugger. It's pretty frustrating to just make changes and hope the program doesn't crash.

If you don't know what Conway's game of life is, here is the general idea: Every pixel is a cell acting independently, whether the cell lives or dies is decided by a set of rules:
1. If three of the eight cells surrounding a dead cell are living, it is born
2. If there are 0 or 1 cells surrounding a living cell, it dies of loneliness
3. If there are 2 or 3 cells surrounding a living cell, it lives on
4. If there are 4 or more cells surrounding a living cell, it dies of overpopulation

To make all this happen, I use most of the extra ram page (13,608 bytes) as well as about 900 bytes of hard-coded routines to do all the checks for every bit. I use the concept of active and not active cells to speed up my simulation (if none of the cells around a cell are alive, it won't do anything next round either). I also make extensive use if IX.

Some stats:

• 160 x 160 board
• goal 16 fps (it typically does this until about 200 active cells)

Controls:

• 2nd - toggle pixel
• Y= - clear board and recenter
• Zoom - step
• Graph - start/stop
• Clear - quit

Here is the game, I've been using it all day, so it works. I'll get the source later, it was written in Mimas after all. And I think my favorite part of this game is that while the actual game is only 1,042 bytes, it expands to about 1,900 bytes of code and uses 14,000 bytes of ram.

Ironically, my name makes a pretty awesome design.

Wow!  Looks great!

Stop making epic programs. Give someone else a chance

Is that at 15MHz? Also, I never understood the game of life

Nice job, though, using Mimas to code games looks cool, I only use it to learn.

That is pretty darn fast. Great work ^^

That was my primary goal in writing it. I wanted this thing to go as fast as possible. Although, I did get it down to about 4 fps with a space filler that filled the entire 160x160 with zebra stripes. It collapsed in on itself and the entire board was in chaos running at 4 fps.

Is that at 15MHz? Also, I never understood the game of life

Nice job, though, using Mimas to code games looks cool, I only use it to learn.

Yes, it's at 15MHz. There's no reason to use 6MHz because of my huge RAM requirements. I just added in a save state today, so now I'm up to 19KB.

I prefer not to use Mimas because I feel the small screen will end up leading me to make small games, but if you don't have time at a computer, it works great. I put out like 3kb of code in 4 hrs on chess, whereas this thing is only up to 1kb after 3 weeks.

Thanks.

As for coding tricks. My buffer is laid out like this. <Active byte> <real byte> <future active byte> <future real byte> Where the active byte is just flags to tell me which pixels I need to check and the real byte is what is actually alive. The future bytes are for calculations.

When I go to calculate it, I first search the buffer for any bytes that are active, I have this loop down to 4 t-states per empty pixel, so there's some speed. Then, when it finds an byte with active pixels in it, it calls a subroutine that throws the location in IX and puts the location of a JP table in HL. (LABEL) It then works through each bit of (IX) while increasing HL by 3 each time. When it encounters an active bit, it RET's into HL which JP's it to one of my 8 bit checking routines. These routines check the necessary 8 bits around the pixel with IX and tally up the number of living cells. When they JP back to the finishing routine. They have D = bit mask as well as E = (bit * 3). The game then sees how to handle this cell, and if it deems it alive, it OR's D into (IX + 3), sets D = $80, and JP's to DE. Which of course, JP's to a routine that sets the 8 bits around the current one as active. This all returns back to LABEL where it finishes off the byte.

When that's all done, I use a stack hack to pop and push the future bytes into the current ones and zero the futures.


My rules are currently not customizable. If I can find an efficient way to make them customizable I will though.

Wow, this looks incredible.  I think it's the best (and quickest) game of life I've seen.

Aw man wow this is cool! (Now I really want a TI-84+)

The Prizm is coming up, but there is hardly any casio fx-xxxx development.

Hey, the Prizm is technically an fx- calc too
It's named fx-CG10 or fx-CG20 depending on your region.