Hi! I played with FPGAs and their ilk a bit in college, and I've been meaning to get back into them for a while, and all the nifty stuff on opencores.org has irreperably piqued my curiosity. There's no way I'll be able to afford the sort of equipment my school could (Xess XSB-300E, I believe). Something in the sub-$200 range is what I'm looking for, and I'm not so keen on building my own board (my soldering skills and tools have never been top-notch), so I'm currently looking at the Xess XSA-50 (http://www.xess.com/prod027.php3) and the Nu Horizons Spartan-3 board (http://www.nuhorizons.com/products/xilinx/spartan3/development-board.html). Anybody have any experience with either? From specs alone, the Spartan-3 looks considerably better to me (though the Xess folks appear to be more keen on product support/documentation). Any suggestions? Experience with either? Know of any other boards that might be good choices? Also, I'm very unfamiliar with most EDA tools. I know there are plenty of good Free/Open tools for HDL simulation, but what about compilation, place&route, etc. all the way up to uploading the design to the board? I ask for three reasons: 1) I'm broke/cheap, and would rather spend money on a better board than on software, 2) my next computer will likely be non-x86, and compilation and place & route are slow enough when not under emulation, and 3) I'm a bit of a Free software (GPL and all that jazz) freak ;) Also, any other general advice? Thanks! - Joel