DIY 8-bit computer, Episode 1B: DIsplay controller pipelining & block RAM

[@Joorin4711]

It's "combinatorial logic" if you want to be picky about it. Other than that I'm impressed by your efforts. FPGAs are still magic to me.

[@davehohacks]

I think both "combinational" and "combinatorial" are accepted. I use "combinational" because the CEs I know say it that way :-) (I'm very much a software guy, so I defer to the hardware folks.) FPGAs are very much magic. I'm planning to return to this project during the summer. Hopefully I'll be able to get some characters on the screen.

[@spacedock873]

@@davehohacks I was always taught "combinational" on my degree course. I suspect that "combinatorial" is an Americanism - it seems common to add syllables for no good reason! At least it's not as bad as German where they make new words by welding all the words that make up the meaning in to one long word!

[@SteveMoody73]

Interesting to see what you're doing here. I've been working on a VGA card for my 68000 based computer but it was less planning and more hacking on the FPGA until it worked. II'm assuming this is for your 6809 computer so I'm wondering how much use the FIFO is going to be here. The FPGA is going to be running far faster than the CPU so how much will that help? I would have thought that a seperate process (or pipeline if you prefer) could read the commands your sending and process them ready when needed. I'm no expert on FPGAs either, had to learn VHDL by nessesity but need to learn Verilog as well I think. Most people seem to be using it now these days

[@davehohacks]

I think you're right about the FIFO: it was mostly be not being confident that I could handle writes from the host system at arbitrary times, due to lack of experience with FPGA design. Maybe I'll fix it in a future revision.