I must have missed the limited ram access when I browsed the slides the first time, I just assumed the youtube Game of Life proved they were poking ascii 'X' chars into video ram at 0xb8000 or whatever. Is there a trick/cheat to how that visualization was done?

Edit: browsed around the code some more and it seems the ascii visualization stuff is done in regular c/asm polling the "virtual game of life" mem(?)