Game of Life Project

Hi everyone, I am doing Conway's Game of Life on the NEXYS2 FPGA board and I had a couple of questions.

Before I ask them though, I will first explain what the game is and what I've done in VHDL so far.

Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton where a few simple rules dictate the outcome of the game. You basically have block that can be either dead or alive. The rules are:

Neighbors < 2 blocks = dead

1 < Neighbors < 4 = Alive

Neighbors > 4 = dead

With a few initial conditions (selecting blocks on your own on the grid before the game enters the go state), you can have the game play out in many different ways. More information at Wikipedia by entering Conway's Game of Life in their search engine.

Anyway, At the moment we have the typical VGA controller that runs horizontal and vertical scans on a screen for 640x480 resolution. This is taking into account the back and front porches. We have even written the state machine component. We are going to be using the on-board RAM flash memory to write bits and read bits that change the game states.

My question was how to utilize the flash memory to read those adjusted bits after the rules are applied and have them be used (either by a flag or something) to paint the macro pixel blocks on the screen. Let me know what you guys think. I'll be happy to upload the .vhd files as well as our state diagram to show what I mean for clarity.