I still have that Ditherpunk article bookmarked! I leaned on its insights heavily when I was building the dither (reduce palette) filter[1] for my canvas library.
"Return of the Obra Dinn" looks fantastic. I keep meaning to purchase/play that game but the intention keeps slipping down my ToDo list while I'm distracted.
Micropolis Web is the browser based version of Micropolis (open source SimCity), that uses WebAssembly, WebGL, and SvelteKit. Based on the original SimCity Classic code, designed by Will Wright, ported by Don Hopkins. This first video has music by Juho Hietala, Blamstrain, and the Space Inventory Cellular Automata is performed by Don Hopkins.
The error diffusion dithering is most noticeable when there's not a lot of heat change in the system (strong enough heating or cooling rotates the tiles towards the extreme, then they wrap around, producing chaotic boiling lava lamp blobs).
Without the error diffusion dithering, the heat diffusion produces much more geometric less organic patterns (sharp diagonal triangular crystals that melt away quickly, instead of fuzzy dithered curvy gradients that smoothly organically diffuse and stay around for a long time).
Strictly it's not actually a "cellular automata" because of the error diffusion: information travels further than one cell locally each frame -- the leftover energy can "quantum tunnel" in the direction of scanning (serpentine left/right / right/left) into cells downstream arbitrarily far away. So when you draw in one part of the image, the dither fingers in all parts of the image wiggle in response. A true cellular automata has no "action at a distance" and the flow of information respects the "speed of light" (one cell or so per frame, depending on the radius of the neighborhood).
>Circuit bending is the creative, chance-based customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low-voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators.
>Emphasizing spontaneity and randomness, the techniques of circuit bending have been commonly associated with noise music, though many more conventional contemporary musicians and musical groups have been known to experiment with "bent" instruments. Circuit bending usually involves dismantling the machine and adding components such as switches and potentiometers that alter the circuit.
