25 Apr
2013
25 Apr
'13
9:04 p.m.
On Thu, 26 Apr 2013, ben wrote:
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
On 4/25/2013 9:18 PM, David Riley wrote:
I hope you remembered your $1000 cables to improve the quality of your
audio! ;)
On Apr 25, 2013, at 9:28 PM, Jim Stephens wrote:
Definitely! FPGAs (and programmable logic in
general) are a lot
of fun despite the somewhat steep learning curve. It's really
hard to find GOOD FPGA programmers out there (we usually run
into software people who have been unwillingly shoehorned into
FPGA dev and treat it like a CPU, so don't make that mistake),
so if you get good at it, it can make you some real money. Lots
of money to be made cleaning up after bad FPGA programmers, if
my job is any indication.
Good ... I'll send you the buggy logic after a few weeks.
AHDL looks to be the cats meow for me, easy to program in
like PAL's. I plan to use slow ripple carry to emulate
TTL logic speeds -- 18 bits with a 1 MHZ memory cycle.
But yeah, have fun. There are SO MANY nice FPGA
boards, mostly
from Digilent and Terasic, that are aimed at hobbyists (maybe
ones with slightly deep pockets sometimes) and have a lot of
fun interfaces to play with.
DE0 looks to be a very nice board, ample memory for a small
computer at a good price. I was planning to build something
with 2901's but because the connectors I ordered did not work as
well as I hoped this came along at the right time.
I still plan to make a front panel for the DE0, to match the
internal the CPU.
I made a VGA controller for my
Terasic DE1 that generated a colorized
"munching squares"
display at 640x480, and it came in under 100 LEs (less than 1%
of the 25K LE FPGA). Really fun to see what you can get away
with, just like logic on a PCB!
Sounds like a C64 sprite controler would be easy, if you still can
get a analog TV set up.
- Dave
Ben.
PS. I do plan on finishing this project, I planned to finish it
within the next 25 years. All my disposable income has gone into
HI-FI equipment, the latest state of the art logic is not going
away for a while.