Other Links
XESS Corporation : XESS provides several FPGA development boards for new and professional users. XESS also provides several designs for their boards. All of the projects posted on this site are ready to run with the XSA-100.
eXpress IP : Dedicated to the manufacturing of programmable logic development systems and Intellectual Property (IP's), they offer an inexpensive fpga board that looks promising. One of the neat features is the apparent availablity of a cpu core, sdram controller, ps2 and rs232 controllers, plus a graphical user interface controller and dma engine included in the package.
Rapid Prototyping of Digital Systems : I am currently working through this book. This is not your typical "learning VHDL" book. It is a tutorial based book that actually uses VHDL to design some really neat stuff. Chapters include explanations and real examples on how to interface to a PS/2 keyboard and mouse, how to drive a VGA monitor (examples include hardware generated - think sprites! - bouncing balls, and text based character displays) Also included are examples on how to design a simple microprocessor, and even a more complex MIPS processor. It is loaded with examples that work! The authors provide designs for an Altera based CPLD board, but I have been able to translate almost everything to my Xilinx based board without too much trouble. See Projects page for some examples. As of this writing, this is without a doubt, one of the best books for the computer hardware enthusiast.
FPGA Arcade : This really cool site provided me with the inspiration to build RetroMicro. Personally, I would like to see an Atari 800 recreated on an FPGA, but until then, I keep scanning this Arcade site. The site includes several full up implementations/recreations of real arcade games. Recently Mike has posted Vic-20 recreation. I never owned a Vic, but just because of his post, I'm tempted to grab one off ebay just to see what it was all about! And then, rebuild it!
FPGA CPU News : Jan Gray's XSOC with a xr16 processor is one of the first project I downloaded off the web. It is a full computer interfaced to memory and vga! One of the best aspects of this project is the amount of documentation provided with the project. If you have an interest in building risc based processors, check out the XSOC project!
Opencores.org : The opencores site is loaded with open source hardware designs. I have also found it quite enlightening to read the Wishbone SoC Interconnection standard document. It provides some really good ideas on how to interconnect pieces and parts through buses and networks.
John Kent's FPGA Page : John has a really nice simple "VHDL CPU" called Micro8. I learned a lot looking at this design, expecially for how to do address decoding. If you have an interest in designing your own CPU, it's nice to study a real working one first!
Obsolete Technology Website : If you think the computers invented in the early 80's were way more cool than the ones today, check out this site. Retro computers of the past have so much more, dare I say, personality?
C-ONE Reconfigurable Computer : This site is dedicated to Jeri Ellsworth's recreation of a Commodore 64, errr... shall I say his very, very fast Commodore 64. She is apparently in the process of building real motherboards... an original RetroMicro!