This is another clone of John Conway's Game of Life for arduino created mostly for the Freetronics dot matrix display.

Life.cpp also compiles in visual studio for debugging and is flexible enough to work with any screen using a rendering function.

The atmega328 which is at the core of my Uno based board is an 8 bit microcontroller. As far as i know instead of doing fast single instruction maths 16 bit integers are maniplated with compiler magic using many instructions. So where a byte is enough that is what i have used.

The Life class takes a bit map as the argument to it's constructor. This is due to the dilemma of not having memory management. The class could have declared the bitmap itself however it would then need to be modified for every application which would lead to fragmented versions.