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I have a hardware-only Conway “Life Machine”, is that interesting?

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gschadow:
Hello, I am new here.

I just finished making a hardware only Life Machine™ on breadboard using 74LSxx chips. I call it The Life Machine™ or Life from Scratch™ It is my first full digital electronics project. It works on an analog oscilloscope in X-Y-Z mode. The field is 256 x 256 pixels in size, and it is set up to run at 4 MHz at a 60 Hz frame-rate, but because of some glitching with the capacitance issues on the breadboard setup, it works well at 1 MHz, 15 Hz framerate. There is one generation per frame, so the design, if properly moved onto a reasonable PCB or wire-wrap board would probably be easily scaleable to a field of 512 x 512 pixels at 60 Hz with an 16 MHz crystal or from there onward.

My algorithm is quite highly optimized so that it runs in a single pass. There is no CPU involved and no micro-controller, no code, its 100% pure hardware automaton. No FPGA. Just RAM, counters, bus transceivers, latches, and a hard-wired neighbor-count-adder with one breadboard slice of 1-bit full-adders, AND, OR, XOR, and inverter chips. No higher order display chip either, even the DAC for the X-Y deflection I made myself from R-2R resistor ladders.

I wonder whether there is interest in this or if this has been done many times before? I wonder how I should publish this? Do you think there is any journal that would have any interest in this? I could imagine I am perhaps 40 years late to the party, but when googling I have not found nether the hardware only setup quite like mine nor have I found my algorithm being discussed and the way it's implemented. I find my solution very nifty.

I know I could just make a web site or just describe the whole thing here, but I am a "recovering" academic and therefore still thinking in peer-reviewed publications where it would get more attention including critique. Even patenting some aspects of it is going around in my mind, just for the heck of it. Perhaps there is some IEEE journal? Any hobbyist or semi-professional magazines or journals still around these days?

Dabbot:
Welcome to the forum! Sure, lets see it.

MK14:
One place that hobbists seem to use, is Hackaday.

E.g. Here is a Conways Life machine, with a giant screen (the link shows a number of Conway Life machines on that website):

https://hackaday.com/?s=conways

Image from one of those machines here:

greenpossum:
By all means publish it, it should be interesting. The Boston Museum of Science had one back in the early 80s, driven at 60 Hz, IIRC. Perhaps you may be able to find references to it.

MK14:

--- Quote from: gschadow on August 18, 2020, 02:59:26 pm ---even the DAC for the X-Y deflection I made myself from R-2R resistor ladders.

--- End quote ---

I wonder if you could have used, a pair (one fast, the other slow), of saw-tooth generators, instead. For the X and Y signal generation. Which if suitably synchronised to the binary counters, clocking the (video) ram output, would have worked. Probably with some fine adjustments.

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