I hope you stick around and do more on the Arduino platforms
@DuaneB : I'll maybe get back working on my Game Buino... but right now I've to make my 3D printer... print. I've been working for 2 months on it, because of the very poor quality of parts (nozzle leaking, smooth rods not smooth, broken bearings, burning MOFSETs...).
If you are still / were considering a big screen project, I'm working on a library for a 3.2" on a mega 2560
@pYro_65 : The mega 2560 has more flash, more ram (good for gaming), more pins (to connect a 16b parallel screen instead of SPI) and you can adress external ram (yeaaaaah). But it's very, very expensive compared to a atmega 328. That's why I chose to do a cheap gaming platform first (to practice PCB routing too), and maybe later, if I want more power, I'll move on ARM 80Mhz 32bit stuff (but it's very difficult to hand solder).
your game of life would make a good game for the Esplora too if it could be modified to use the 32U4's 2.5KB SRAM
@TheKitty : your world is 128*128 wide = 16k cells. My algorithm uses 1 byte per cell (you can use 1 bit per cell but it's far, far slower). So you need 16kB of RAM, so I used an external SPI ram. You can use a smaller world (32*32 = 1k) and magnify it if you want to spare ram, but it will be far less cool.