When I was a teenager, I read a book about assembly language for the commodore and implemented the game of life in a really simple way. I just used the text screen. To switch on a cell, I would put an asterisk ('*') in it. Then I could run my machine code program and it would evolve according to the rules of the game of life.

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abcd_f 2 hours ago | parent [-]

And who didn't do that! :)

You could also 4x the resolution by using half- and quarter-block characters from the top half of the ASCII table (or it'd be the PETSCII one i C64 case).

	▲	lproven 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> And who didn't do that! :) Exactly. It's even how I taught myself extremely basic Pascal -- getting my BASIC Life program running in Pascal. With asterisks. A taught a friend at uni, who was a much better programmer than me, how the algorithm worked. He did a pixel-by-pixel version in machine code, but it was a bit slow on a ZX Spectrum. So he did exactly the quarter-character-cell version you describe. I wrote the editor in BASIC, and he wrote a machine-code routine that kicked in when told and ran the generations. For extra fun he emitted some of the intermediate state to the border, so the border flashed stripes of colour as it calculated, so you could see it "thinking". Handy for static patterns -- you could see it hadn't crashed. I've been considering doing a quarter-cell Mandelbrot for about 30Y now. Never got round to it yet.