FPGA Programming
Ive been eyeing off a Nexys-2 from Digilent systems for a while. I think it would be an awesome opporutinity to do something like CoCo3 in FPGA. I think CoCo3 would be a lot easier to implement (A coco2 would be MUCH easier than a CoCo3) than say a TI99. The only downside is the GIME chip in the coco3 (which is what really separates a CoCo2 from a 3).
The Nexys2 looks like a really nice board, and one thing it does over a lot of its other cheap competitors, is have a 12bit VGA dac. Most other Spartan3 boards seem to have 1bit dacs for 8 colours. What good is 8 colors?
Xess have a nice board, the XSA-3S1000 which does good VGA but lacks anything in the way of inputs (it has a ps2 port).
The Xess board has 32mb dram, the Digilent has 16mb.
| Xess XSA-3S1000 | Digilent Nexys-2 | |
|---|---|---|
| DRAM | 16mb | 16mb |
| Flash | 2mb | 16mb |
| Gates | 1000k | 500k |
| Spartan | 3, XCS31000 | 3E, XC3S500E |
| $$ | 199$ | 99$ |
Clearly the Nexys-2 kicks its butt on all but gates.
Hmm. Altera have a nice Cyclone II dev board that includes sound out and SD/MMC slot… 240k ram bits and 20k logic elements…
Wondering if its enough but its sure the nicest board for price yet!
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