[Coco] Is Grant Searle's site down?

[Dave Philipsen]

> On Mar 17, 2017, at 7:14 PM, James Ross <jrosslist at outlook.com> wrote:
> 
> Dave Philipsen said:
> 
>> You can get the FPGA board for about $16 on eBay and if you use faster 
>> SRAM chips you can run the CPU at 25 MHz.  
> 
> The two FPGA projects he has on this site (uk101FPGA & Multicomp) are indeed VERY nice for learning FPGA programming at least at an intermediate level… I would need to start w/ the very basics. Flashing LEDs on and off and reading switches!  Understand how everything works off a clk and everything happens at the same time (so to speak?)!

I would suggest getting a Terasic DE-1.  There are a lot of LEDs, switches, 7 seg LEDs, etc. that you can play with and at the same time you can bounce back and forth between your experimenting and the CoCo3FPGA project.

I have found that programming the hardware has some similarities to software state machines.  It also helps if you've played around with 'real' hardware (like TTL chips and CPUs). But it does take a different mind set than software programming.  I've been noodling around with a few FPGA dev boards for almost 2 years now.  It's fun but I'm still far from being an expert!

Dave


> 
>> In fact, on that board or 
>> possibly another with a few more I/O pins you could instantiate one or 
>> two more VGA & keyboard ports or even several serial ports.  
> 
> It would be a lot of fun to learn!  
> 
> James
> 
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