John H. Conway's Game of Life for the 3k expanded VIC

[Mike]

I had the privilege to be there when "A Mind Is Born" was first presented on bigscreen at Revision 2017, in the Oldskool 4K Intro Compo. On YouTube, the demo starts at 20:27. Note how the crowd cheers, when the tune takes a twist in the last part.

lft did a detailed writeup on the demo in his own blog, here: https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/

Hopefully next year's Revision will again take place in the same form we had until last year ...

[chysn]

I was going through my VIC20 subdirectory today, cleaning some things up, and I saw a directory called ca-maze. I cd-ed to it and saw my typical src and vic directory structure, and found that ca-maze.asm was a routine for advancing one generation of Game of Life on the screen. It's not made to strictly run GoL, but to create a maze based on a variation of GoL rules (for one thing, cells die of overpopulation at 6 neighbors).

The files were dated June 4, 2020. The weird thing is, I have absolutely no memory of doing this. I'm clearly the author based on the code style, comment format, names of labels, etc. But I simply don't remember doing it. Chances are I was looking for a new way to generate a game board, tried GoL as an experiment, was dissatisfied with the result (below), and abandoned it.

But if you asked me last week whether I'd ever done any CA work for the VIC-20, I'd have said "Nope." During this time, I was thoroughly obsessed with another VIC-20 project, so I'm not sure why I even took up the CA Maze idea in the first place.

[shirleyknott]

Good work and I really like the animation effect. I've run it successfully in emulator, but tried it on two different real (PAL) vics, each time using Penultimate+ set to 3k and have the same problem on both. The program runs, I see the menu and can move the arrow up and down, but can't get past that. The fire button appears to do nothing (switched joysticks and tried them with other games). The program remains responsive and I can still move the arrow up and down after pressing / holding / mashing the fire button (tried keys too in case there's another way to select from the menu.) My emulator was also set to PAL so I'm not sure that's related.

Has anyone else seen this with real hardware? Am I missing something?

[huffelduff]

The program runs, I see the menu and can move the arrow up and down, but can't get past that. The fire button appears to do nothing (switched joysticks and tried them with other games). The program remains responsive and I can still move the arrow up and down after pressing / holding / mashing the fire button (tried keys too in case there's another way to select from the menu.)
Has anyone else seen this with real hardware? Am I missing something?

Hi there Shirley, my sincere apologies for my belated response. I have not been on the forum lately, life got in the way and such.
Anyhow, thank you so much for pointing out the bug in the application.
I have tried to correct it and I hope it works on your hardware now. Test at your leisure.

[huffelduff]

I had the privilege to be there when "A Mind Is Born" was first presented on bigscreen at Revision 2017

Wow.

[shirleyknott]

Test at your leisure.

Runs perfectly! Thank you so much and no need to apologise. Thank you for the project, I really like the animation. It's happily running here like a screensaver.

[Mike]

Huffelduff,

I have tried to correct it [...]

Runs perfectly! [...]

what exactly did you change to fix the issue? That info could be quite interesting so others won't repeat the same oopsie.

Greetings,

Michael

[chysn]

Huffelduff,

I have tried to correct it [...]

Runs perfectly! [...]

what exactly did you change to fix the issue? That info could be quite interesting so others won't repeat the same oopsie.

Was wondering the same.

[huffelduff]

Test at your leisure.

It's happily running here like a screensaver.

That's so cool. Thank you once again for testing and the feedback.

what exactly did you change to fix the issue?

Was wondering the same.

Well its not something very hardware technical or anything. Its a coding fault as a result of messing around. I was playing with the idea of having a function activate depending on the amount of time that one de-presses the fire button. This is something I still want to attempt in an interface. And I have a variable that I use to denote a fire press. So instead of assigning the variable a value of 1, I increment the fire button counter. So obviously Shirley's machine/joystick is astute and reports multiple events. So instead of using an increment I just assign a value of 1 now. So the fact that it worked at all on some systems I find quite miraculous. This faulty code may be also be lurking in older projects...

Greetings