@MartinEnder Awesome! ... Ugh, they didn't use the permalink. They actually just told people to go to the QFTASM page, set RAM to 3-32, and hit "Run", but don't say anything about replacing the code.
@trinalbadger587 You'll need Golly. Download it, and open Tetris.mc (for VarLife) or TetrisOTCAMP.mc (for GoL). You can also use the online QFTASM interpreter for a more-playable version.
I get the following errror: File could not be loaded by any algorithm. Error from QuickLife: Cannot read macrocell format. Error from HashLife: Bad character found. Error from LargerThanLife: Cannot read macrocell format.
I got it to work.
Anonymous
4:47 PM
You also need the VarLife.rule file somewhere where Golly can find it
Re: the "256x256 metacell" in Golly's pattern collection --
yes, it's 512x512 as a later commenter mentions,
and it's hard-wired to work only for B3/S23, so a lot of it would have to be rebuilt to work as drop-in replacements for VarLife cells.
This wouldn't be terribly hard to do -- but it's not worth doing in practice.
See the comments for the pattern -- Golly's Patterns/Life/Signal-Circuitry/Unit-Life-Cell-512x512.rle --
the period is 5760, which just like the OTCA Metapixel is not at all Hashlife-friendly.
It was built in the previous millennium (1996). In the last twenty years signal circuitry has gotten so much more compact that we could now fit a programmable metacell with a pure power-of-two period, into the same 512x512 box as that hard-wired B3/S23 unit cell.
That might actually allow Golly to run the GoL version of the Tetris computer at a reasonable speed, though the display would still be an issue -- 512x512 doesn't leave much room for a pixel area.
The bare beginnings of a 512x512 design using stable circuitry can be seen here:
