I'm tying to build GOL on PICO-8, but the per-pixel manipulation is just too slow. Anything more than about 48x48 is unacceptably slow.
Initially I was reading/writing into temporary tables but that was really slow. This approach keeps all the state on the screen and in a sprite so there's about a quarter of the work from the table approach, but it's still slow.
I've started another experiment with peek4/poke4 but the coordinate wrapping is a total pain.

1


Check out rilden's Game of Life implementation for a very fast implementation. By using bitwise operations, 32 cells can be updated at once. With that, 390 FPS is possible for a 128x128 grid.
[Please log in to post a comment]