Re: A86: Show Down, (Life)

To: assembly-86@lists.ticalc.org
Subject: Re: A86: Show Down, (Life)
From: David Phillips <electrum@tfs.net>
Date: Fri, 04 Sep 1998 18:44:07 -0500
Delivered-To: assembly-86-outgoing@towerguard.unix.edu.sollentuna.se
In-Reply-To: <19980904.165136.8542.1.sampablo@juno.com>
Reply-To: assembly-86@lists.ticalc.org

Ah, this was Michael Abrash's second Optimization Challege that he made in
PC Techniques a while back.  I agree that this is a good challege.  The
game of life looks very cool when displayed full screen at 20-30 frames per
second.

But, I see a couple of problems with this challege.  The first is that
there is no accurate way to time the program, due to the fact that the
calculator has virtually no timing hardware.  It might be possible to do it
using interrupts and by having the program count frames, but this speed
would be affected by battery life and other conditions.  It would be
impossible to count cycles of a program like this.

The second fact is that the refresh rate of the LCD display is so slow that
a fast program would run faster than the screen could keep up (the same as
the maximum bandwidth of a VGA...).  This would make visual compares very
hard or impossible.

But, I agree it is a good challege.

P.S.  I hate country music. 

At 04:51 PM 9/4/98 -0500, you wrote:
>
>I am sorry that some of the people on this list think that other people
>on the list can't program.  I can't name names (I deleted all those
>messages).  How about a show down:
>
>Conway's Game of Life, who ever can refresh the entire screen (all 128 *
>64 pixels) the fastest, is the winner.  I'm sure these two people know
>what Life is, if they've been around for any time.
>
>This is probably not the best challenge, because this has been done _so_
>often, and there are _so_ many programs out there (complete with code). 
>Does anyone have a better challenge?
>
>
>
>Also I have a question, How many programmers here listen to country
>music?
>
>
>
>Sam (listening to his country music)
>
>
>
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--
David Phillips
mailto:electrum@tfs.net
ICQ: 13811951
AOL/AIM: Electrum32

References:

A86: Show Down, (Life)

From: sampablo@juno.com (Samuel Camp)