Conway's game of life

Welcome to the forums bverhage!

Assuming you are talking about first generation MSX, the closest to a "bitmap mode", which I think is what you need is to use Screen 2. In Screen 2, the screen is made out of "tiles", where each tile is a block of 8x8 pixels, defined by two blocks of 8 bytes:
- 8 pattern bytes: where each byte represents a row of 8 pixels, and each bit in each byte is one pixel.
- 8 attribute bytes: where each byte also represents a row of 8 pixels, and contains two colors (4 bits per color).
- a 0/1 in the pattern bits switches between using one or the other color specified for that block of 8 pixels in the attribute bytes.

So, assuming you want a black/white screen, and just turn on/off pixels, this is what I would suggest:
- Switch to screen 2
- Initialize the 768 bytes of the"name table" to 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ... 255, 0, 1, 2, ..., 255, 0, 1, 2, ..., 255 (this basically sets screen 2 in what some people call "bitmap mode").
- Then set all 6144 bytes of the "attribute table" to 0xf0 (black and white)

For an example of how to do all three steps above, you can see the "set_bitmap_mode_a_color" function here: https://github.com/santiontanon/triton/blob/master/src/gfx-b...
If you do:

    ld a,2      ; Set screen 2
    call CHGMOD  ; CHGMOD = #005f
    ld a,0xf0
    call set_bitmap_mode_a_color

Then, you will have the srceen set up

- Finally, now you can just write arbitrary values to the pattern table, and setting bits to 1 or 0 to change colors from black to white or vice-versa
- If you just want to switch one single bit, then you need to read the byte in the position you want to write on the screen, change the one bit, and write it back.
- You can see examples in the "draw_white_pixel" and "draw_black_pixel" here: https://github.com/santiontanon/triton/blob/master/src/state...

Anyway, it looks like you are having fun, I hope this helps! :)

Thank you for the examples! Looking into them to see if I can get my idea to work.

After some googling I already guessed it would be quicker to work with a buffer in memory and copy that to video memory. But since it's fun to play around I also want to try to write it pixel by pixel. Just because I had this in my mind. Hopefully it will give me a better understanding of what I am doing and why

Here you can find a MSX Basic implementation of Conway's game of life in textual screen mode, that you can also compile using MSXBAS2ROM to speed it.