Back in the days of s100 computers, I had a poly 88. I wrote a game-of-life that used the video memory as the cell array. characters meant a dead cell that next gen would be live, dead -> dead, live -> dead, live->live - one pass replaced the current generation with one of those 4 chars. The second pass would resolve the chars back to Live "@" and dead "." cells. 8080 Machine code (hand assembled). It would do about 1 generation a second. The life array was 40x25..