Pause + unpause disturbs the grid

MiSTer-devel / Life_MiSTer

Conway's Game of Life for MiSTer

MIT License

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Pause + unpause disturbs the grid #1

Open vpelletier opened 4 years ago

vpelletier commented 4 years ago

To reproduce:

seed the grid or load a pattern which fills a lot of the grid but eventually "stabilises" while including cyclical patterns (ex: 3 horizontal cells alternating with 3 vertical cells)
wait for it to stabilise "enough" for perturbations to be obvious
switch "Running" on and off (maybe a few times)
some previously stable areas of the screen became perturbed (cells move out of their cyclic patterns in well-localised spots)

hrvach commented 4 years ago

Hello! Thanks for the feedback.

I have an idea why this is probably happening - pause and resume should probably be synchronized to a fixed location in the shift register, otherwise a subset of the grid will be one generation ahead and that's probably what's happening. Will try to test and fix.

vpelletier commented 4 years ago

a subset of the grid will be one generation ahead

This would be my guess as well.

pause and resume should probably be synchronized to a fixed location in the shift register

I was wondering about this (I did not look at the code, though), and then wondered why this would matter: if run picks up from the exact state where pause happened (gating the clock - or otherwise freezing all registers - on the whole thing ?), then it should also be fine.

hrvach commented 4 years ago

The pause doesn't work by gating the clock, it continues to loop but with modifications disabled. I'll try fixing it, currently I'm working on another core and that takes the little free time I have left. :)

vpelletier commented 4 years ago

BTW, thanks for taking the time to implement this tribute. I learned Conway's passing via a Brady Haran video, and it was quite a sad moment. Especially rewatching his interviews on the monster group, and how he did not expect to see why they have their properties in his lifetime, and to have somewhat made his peace with it.

ddcruver commented 1 year ago

Issue is still present, but more importantly...

Thanks for your work on this Core, it was interesting to see this implemented on MiSTer it is nice to see Original content implemented on the MiSTer to add value to an already very interesting and important project.