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Dave Greene
Dave Greene
1:11 AM
I like the idea of smaller metacells for the computer, and a bank of larger display cells for the screen.
Technically there's no need to make the display cells actual metacells, though --
it's really easy to build a display that turns on for 2^N ticks whenever a signal comes in, and then off again whenever a signal fails to come in.
So you just pipe an extra output from some memory metacell's CELL_IS_ALIVE circuitry over to the right display pixel. Can use MWSSes for signals. Even with a fairly large display area, they'll get there pretty fast compared to a metapixel's cycle.
Here's a sample piece of modern circuitry using MWSSes to give an idea of how the connectors might work:
http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=59723#p59723
 
quartata
quartata
Yeah, it's true we don't need full metapixels -- in fact, we'd rather they don't signal their neighbors so
Aside from updating the metafier to use the 512x512 we also need to control what sections get metafied now
@DaveGreene whats the period on your metacell
 
Dave Greene
Dave Greene
1:30 AM
Right now it's running at 2^14, p16384. I kind of suspect I'll be able to cut it down to p8192, but I'm not absolutely sure yet that all the signals will come in from neighboring cells in time to be counted at that speed.
 
quartata
quartata
that's still a good improvement
 
Dave Greene
Dave Greene
The neighbor connections are all that's left to be done, besides a small metapixel area. I've left it lying around for months in hopes that someone else would pick it up and finish it, but no such luck...
Really the big improvement from Golly's point of view is that it's a power of two. Hashlife doesn't really care much which power of two.
 
 
1 hour later…
quartata
quartata
3:02 AM
Bleh, not looking forward to cooking input in userspace with no libc...
Probably won't need it for Pong though thinking about it
 

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