I realized after recording the last video that my method of converting the work area into the game board was overly complicated, so the first order of business this time was to simplify that. That also got rid of the buggy behavior we ended with last time.

Then we do some self-modifying code to save bytes, which is cool but also shows how easily that can result in bugs. Got that working, but there still seem to be a few cells that don’t work right. Next step will be to add some features like the ability to control the progress of the game with the keyboard, so we can slow it down and watch it work turn-by-turn.

I spent the last several minutes of this one trying to figure out which memory location keypresses arrive in, so I thought about cutting that out, but I did say at the beginning of this series that you’d get to see it all, so it’s in there.

Now that the holidays are over, I’ll post the next video in this series each Monday.