I just googled "Arduino" and I am now intrigued and I'd like to know more. This sounds like the kind of thing we used in a Robotics class I took my senior year of highschool. But I don't have one to use on my own.

Well, you've probably already found the main Arduino homepage at http://www.arduino.cc so I'll say a bit about the chip. The Arduino is based on the Atmel ATmega328, which is an 8-bit RISC processor -- so we're in the realms of the NES or SNES here, as an 8-bit CPU! It runs at 16MHz and most instructions execute in one cycle, making it quite a bit faster than the 6502 in the NES. But there's only 2K of RAM in the chip, which was certainly a limiting factor for me with the Life program, because I needed two bit-maps of cells of 864 bytes each. The basic Arduino has no display, but there are many add-on LCD and video board for it. I used an LCD from an old Nokia phone, the 1202. It's quite simple to interface and because it's monochrome, the bit-map is small enough to be manageable on the Arduino. The code is written in C via the Arduino's IDE and the GCC compiler. All the object code is written into the Flash memory of the Arduino -- there's room for 32k of object code, which in my case includes a rudimentary font for the LCD.

Hope that gives you a flavour of the Arduino and the Atmel processor chip!

If I ever get around to get a display for my Arduino I will try this out!