Getting started with programmable logic, was Re: Cray 1 replica

On 8/30/10, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: I'm in the same boat - I have an older Spartan FPGA on an IOB6120, but I've done little with it other than stare at the source with vague comprehension. Before the Cray-1 replica post, I was already looking at the Diligent boards because of the project that does arcade machine emulation on them (the example I saw was with one of the line of Diligent Spartan 3E boards, running Asteroids or Pac-Man, etc). Excellent. For me, Linux development support is 100% essential. I'm not likely to bother to get started if I have to set up a new environment just to play with toys (I'm already set for Arduino and Makerbot hacking from my CentOS laptop). Can you be a little more specific? What counts as "the very largest"? I am, in fact, a bit muddled about which Diligent board would be a good buy. I see prices between $100 and $200 for boards with various features, but besides just buying the most expensive board because "of course" it will have the most extras (attached RAM amount, gate count, etc), I'm not sure what to get to be able to take advantage of what appears to be an active pool of Diligent-based projects (I've encountered two just in the past 10 days). I've seen gate counts like 100K, 250K, 500K, and I've seen model numbers like the "Spartan 3E-1600" and am not quite sure what maps to what. Could someone who owns a Diligent board provide any information about variations from model to model and what features are "must haves"? Thanks, -ethan