DPHP 11 - Technologic Rehashed

And that's my last video. I readers will be pleased. I should be current from here on out, right?

In this I decided to redo my Conway's Game of Life simulation.  The last one was flawed, it ran for a finite number of cycles and did not have any 'end condition' detection.  So, it was perfectly possible for the screen to hit a repeating or frozen state.  So I fixed that with some interesting use of 'lifetimes' that was linked to the hue of the cell, and some interesting use the neighbor function to detect repeating or frozen screens.

But the bigger 'behind the scenes' change was the use of a new firmware for the rainbowduinos.  Funnily enough, this firmware is very similar to one of the failed firmwares from way back in the infancy of the software development.  My janky original firmware uses multiple send and receive 'sessions' because there is a limit to the size of the send buffer.  As a result, there are largish delays introduced because of the need for the multiple sessions and having to wait after each data transmission.  Well, apparently, when I tried to up that buffer back in the day, I changed only one of the two numbers I was supposed to change to get it work.

Either way, I'm using a new firmware that is far more robust.  It did require a rather large 'going over' of my code, especially the oldest stuff that was coded at a very low level to save on operating memory.  Fun to do?  Not in the slightest.  But everything works so much nicer and faster now.  I haven't done any refresh rate testing yet, but early 'camera testing' doesn't cause any of the usual weirdness like you get when you point at a TV, or like in my very first videos.

So, guess I need to start planning these posts out a bit more, now that I'm out of videos to use as a starting point.  Bugger.