I took delivery of the Spartan 3e board today.  I’ve always wanted to get into FPGA programming.  I  managed to go through a tutorial and got a decoder implemented.  I thought there was a little more to this stuff, but then again my initial exposure to FPGAs was writing linux code for a PPC core on a virtex 5, and that was more involved.

Next I tried programming a pacman board from fpgaarcade with the pong roms.  It worked first try.

Awesomeness!

The ISE webpack tools that I used are huge, a 6GB install. I’ll have to think of something fun to do with this now. Here is pong in action: