Shiru wrote:
To implement something in FPGA you first need to get a devboard, and they are rather costly.
I also design random digital schematics sometimes, either modern MCU-based, or something retro, and never implement them in reality, because I don't have money for this. It is not that useless, as it allows to learn something new.
Not any more. FPGA dev boards are relatively cheap these days. For under 200 bucks you can get a very decent one that has RAM, flash, video, audio, SD card, ethernet (I think) and other doo-dads.
I highly recommend using Altera parts and staying away from Xilinx, simply because Altera's quartus software is so much nicer/better than webpack ise. This is personal pref of course, but I've been using quartus for 7 years or so now.
For a dev board, the DE series by terasic is very nice and cheap.
http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/ ... o=53&No=83
$150 (or $125 if you get the academic discount, which I hear is easy to get) for a really nice board that is more than enough to do an FPGA NES and then some on.
That board has SRAM, SRAM, flash, VGA, audio and tons of other goodies.
The DE1 level of FPGA'age is good enough to implement all the FPGA consoles I've done so far (8 or 9) and I have yet to run out of resources.
Shameless plug: Since I finished the FPGA NES, I have gone on to implement these ones too:
* SMS/GG
* Colecovision
* Atari 2600
* Intellivision + Intellivoice + ECS
* Odyssey^2 + the voice
* Supervision
* adventure vision
* Mandelbrot renderer (I have code released for that in verilog)
All of those consoles are 100% finished and run every game made.
Currently I am working on SPC700 and hope to start on SNES some time.