Problems with (somewhat) large boolean arrays I am writing a simple Conway's Game of Life implementation just to get to grips with the "Nokia 3310" LCD and I am having problems with boolean arrays. I am using an (unofficial) Arduino Pro Micro 5V/16MHz

Here's the code that is causing me trouble:

boolean buffer[84][48];

void setup(){  
  for(int i = 0; i &lt; 84; i++){
    for(int j = 0; j &lt; 48; j++){
      buffer[i][j] = true;
    }
  }
}

void loop(){}


When I upload this to the Arduino, it seemingly freezes up with the RX led on and its COM port stops working. If I want to upload any other sketch, I have to manually pull the RST pin LOW (since the Pro Micro doesn't have a reset button).

I've been playing around with the code and found out that the source of problems is this line:

buffer[i][j] = true;


It also doesn't matter if I use true or false.

I have tried debugging with Serial to the computer, but the Serial communication doesn't work at all, so I tried using an LED to find out where the problem is. I don't have any "regular" LEDs on me, so I had to try with an Adafruit NeoPixel. The outcome was quite interesting. When I comment out the problematic line, everything runs just fine, the led goes red for 500ms then it blinks white every time the problematic line would run and then it goes green and stays that way. With the problematic line in place, the LED won't do anything, even turn red, which I put much earlier in the code than the source of the problem.

Does anybody have any insights that might be useful? (Also, I really hope it is not some stupid typo, I swear I read it through about twenty times)
According to http://arduino.cc/en/pmwiki.php?n=Reference/BooleanVariables, "Each boolean variable occupies one byte of memory." Meaning you are trying to use 4032 Bytes of RAM with your array which I assume you do not have (whatever this unofficial Arduino is -- it's likely to be less than that: the ATmega328 of the Arduino Mini has 2 kB of SRAM, the ATmega32u4 of the Micro has 2.5 kB). 

You could try with a quarter of the field size for a start and see if that makes your problems go away.