Arduino running Game of Life?

remember you also have 512bytes of eeprom.... not super fast but still useable

although not cheap you can use max7219 chips to drive lots of leds...

here you can see a matrix i've made with 48 led blocks (but could be expanded)

end result

i've built an API that lets me draw and write text
it's not difficult

m

I have to ask where you got those beautiful white matrix.