Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Main Forum => Topic started by: GaryMcT on August 28, 2009, 11:55:54 pm
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The JROK Williams stuff has me interested in writing some FPGA code in a similar vein for other hardware. Anyone have experience with this sort of thing?
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I have done FPGA work. The first thing you'll have to get around is that it is not "programming". You don't give the hardware a set of instructions to accomplish sequentially, you're actually attempting to describe hardware. The language you will use is referred to as a "hardware description language" for just this reason. I prefer Verilog as it is less verbose than VHDL, but everybody seems to have a preference of their own.
I usually use Xilinx hardware. You can get a S3E dev board for ~$100 from Digilent. You can easily get started with just a copy of ISE Webpack and a simulator.
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Cool. I'll have to look into that. Thanks for the info!
I used to work at 3Dfx writing graphics demos back in the day. . I should have paid more attention to all the hardware guys implementing the chips in Verilog back then! :)
How hard is it to take a particular CPU and get it going with an FPGA board? Do you have to do your own PCB layout to do this sort of thing?