Just purchased and received a Xilinx Spartan-3E starter kit. Trying to teach myself from all the information available on the web... It's the fastest or densest FPGA board, but seems to be the best starter board for the ~$150 price range I found with a decent (500+K gate equiv) and a reasonable amount of on board interfaces (including 10/100 Ethernet phy) to test with.... I did find the full VGA cores on the opencores site. I am wondering if anyone has a text based video core they could point me to. (If it matched the 8 color (3 bit) of the starter kit that would be ideal). I want to keep the resources for video to a minimum, but I do want to provide a console and/or status display. If not, I'll try to create one and make it available for everyone to critique... (If I do it, it will probably not be pretty... software guy trying to do hardware logic for the first time...) If anyone has any pointers to reference designs or sample projects of any kind that will easily work with this board, let me know. (Especially if they use either the Ethernet or video ports. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.opencores.org/forums.cgi/cores/attachments/20060807/de418aa6/attachment.htm

Hi John, There is a text based VDU included in System09 that uses block RAM. It's called VDU8 and can easily be separated from system09. It has 5 memory mapped registers, X & Y position, Character, Attribute and scroll offset. It displays 80 x 25 characters. It has 3 bit (8 colour) foreground and background attribute bits as well as flashing character and chunky graphics character attribute bits. It uses a 25MHz pixel clock and approximately 32KHz horizontal line frequency. I'm not sure what the frame rate is. You will find an ADM3A video driver written in C for it on my web site. The version for the Spartan2e using 512byte Block RAMs is here: http://members.optushome.com.au/jekent/system09/index.html A version for the Spartan3 Starter board (NOT the Spartan3E) using 2K Block RAM is here. http://members.optushome.com.au/jekent/Spartan3/index.html Since the Spartan3 version uses 2K Block RAM, for the text buffer, attribute buffer and character generator ROM it should be adaptable to the Spartan3E, but I have not tried it. You can also find the VHDL code under CVS on open cores for the System09 project. I stored it as one big zip file. John. Lauro, John wrote: -- http://members.optushome.com.au/jekent