Micro­power

small table – it rarely exceeds 4K. Of course, you never get anything for nothing. The software to follow the evolution of the colony is much more complicated ; you have to search the table for adjacent cells, count them, and them apply the rules to build up a coordinate table for the next generation. In addition, you have to write a routine to map the coordinate table to the screen. However, you only have to scan the cells in the table; in the more usual life program all cells, alive and dead, are scanned. The result is that this version of life is much faster for small colonies – in fact you have to slow it down if there are less than 20 cells, or you can’t follow the changes. The break even point seems to be a population of 100, when the program runs at 6 generations a second with a 4Mhz Z80, which is about typical for the normal version.

Now to the program. It is started by E1000, and immediately jumps to £1503; the region between contains tables and subroutines. At £1503 the screen is cleared, various workspace parameters are initialised, and the screen header is written to the top line. One of the subroutines called in the initialisation procedure is SETPIX, £12F3. This writes the Nascom 2 pixel set to a programmable character generator. My PCG sits from £0000 – £07FF, so the address where the pixels are situated is £0400 – £07FF; if you have a PCG at a different address, just change £12F4 to the necessary value. If you still use characters in ROM, SETPIX should not affect your system, unless you have RAM down at £0000, and the program will run perfectly happily with ROM graphics.

When you run the program you will be presented with a blank screen, except for the header on the top line and a flashing cursor in the middle. To enter a pattern, use keys Q, W, A, S, Z and X. Each time you press one of these keys the state of the corresponding pixel at the cursor will change. Each time you turn a cell ‘on’ its coordinates are entered in the table (the coordinates of the bottom left pixel are displayed on the top line), and when you turn it ‘off’ at is deleted from the table.

With the cursor keys you can move the whole screen left, right up, and down. Note that the screen image moves but the cursor remains stationary in the middle. In effect, you are moving a window around, looking into an array. If you move the pattern off the screen its coordinates are still in the table, so when you move the window back the pattern will reappear. You can thus build up very large and complex patterns; however, it is best to experiment with small patterns initially.

To help you there are several patterns stored in the program – you can make these appear at the cursor by entering SHIFT/A – Z. You can enter these standard patterns at several different positions. You can also rotate and reflect the whole screen by pressing R and F. By combining direct entry and the standard patterns you can quickly build up complex arangements.