FPGA hacking

I recently acquired an Altera Nios Development Kit, Cyclone Edition with a AleaREP Lancelot daughercard to do FPGA hacking on. So far, my biggest project has been cloning the Swedish ABC80 microcomputer from the late 1970's, but I also have written a few more hacks, including the CompactFlash player that is available on the Lancelot page as a demo.

The source code to these various projects are here.

I picked the Nios Cyclone card mostly because it was the most decked-out card I could get which had a free compiler (free as in beer, not as in freedom) available, and because it happened to be on sale for half price right when I was looking around. A less expensive card with a similar feature set can be gotten from MJL.

The Cyclone EP1C20 on these boards is roughly a 1,000,000-gate FPGA (20,060 LUT logic elements.) So far I've never managed to run out of LUTs on this one, although it's easy to run out of internal memory (it has 32K of on-chip memory, divided into 64 dual-ported RAMs.) The on-chip memories on an FPGA are just way too useful...

Download a zipfile with all the images. (9.7 MiB).

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