Any cheap/fairly close dev fpga boards?

[AntialiasedPixel]

I've played around a bit with building some simple code examples, outputting basic color gradients to the screen, etc, but want to go a little further. I don't really want to have to swap out the SD card or worry about interactions from all the mister stuff hooked up, so I'm considering a second de-10, or if there's something relatively close in setup/functionality, preferably with video out(hdmi or vga is fine) that I could run basically the same code that could run on the de-10(simple projects, not full mister cores), that would be nice.

Anything in the sub $100 range that would fill this niche?

[dshadoff]

Everything else is fairly different, with a lot fewer peripherals, and in most cases no ARM processor. So from that point of view, you are best to stick with DE10-Nano based on functionality.

On the other hand, the framework gives you a lot of functionality, and takes away all of the pins...so it really depends on what you are planning to do.

[robinsonb5]

As dshadoff said, it really depends what you want.

If you want cheap then the QMTech EP4CE55 board is hard to beat - it has 32 meg of SDRAM but there's no ARM, and no peripherals onboard but loads of IOs so you'd have to hook up your own VGA / PS/2 / Sound / SDCard - or buy a breakout board too. Oh, and you need a USB Blaster for programming. (The Neptuno and latest UnAmigas are based on this board.)

Another option is the DE10-lite - I use one of these when developing for the Turbo Chameleon 64 (because it's the same tech level but twice the capacity) - so this board had RTG Minimig before MiSTer, before MiST and even before TC64! Again, no ARM, but it has 64 megs of SDRAM, 4-bits-per-gun VGA and plenty of IOs, so you have to hook up your own SD Card, audio and PS/2 if required. Built-in USB-Blaster. This board does have support in a few projects around the web, such as litex and f32c.

Both of those options have FPGAs about half the size of the DE10-nano's.

If you want to use any of the MiSTer framework facilities, then stick to the DE10-nano.

[jca]

There is the DE0-nano SOC at $99 which is like a little DE10-nano, at some point someone started to port MISTer to it and quite a few cores could run, the exception was the big cores. It had no video output so a special I/O board was developed and had the VGA output. The DE0-nano SOC also supported the SDRAM board.
The project has died and the link to the I/O board is gone.