> > b) Life on Mars. An implementation of John Conway's life (in at least
a
>
> You ain't the first attemtping that:
>
> - Check in the archive for "life;game" to see what happened to the
> attempts of John V. Matthews and theories about it.
> - Check espacially for a thread called "Atari Life" with additional
> info.
Thanks for the pointers. Nobody seems to have considered packing the data
in RAM. Considering that MOST of the playfield during a life 'game' is 0
(the theoretical maximum is 50% used), and that large areas of the playfield
are usually contiguous 0's... and also that non-zero and alternating
patterns are typically grouped together... I figure a simple run-length
packing (speed essential!) would be feasible.
All the messages I read seem to assume that 1 bit/pixel is the limit that
can be achieved. This is not so! As a simple example, byte-aligned runs of
0's only (eight 0's) could be efficiently packed to a single bit, and all
other data left as-is (plus another bit). This would be pretty quick to
unpack, yet save HEAPS of RAM.
I'm still thinking about the feasibility and operation of the kernal, and
how I can interleave run-length unpacking into the display kernal, in
particular. I'm not saying it CAN be done... I just think it might be
possible :)
Cheers
A
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