MiSTer FPGA Forum

I want to kick off a thread collecting tutorial and books about Verilog and designing video game hardware in HDL. Here a few resources to get things rolling:

Books:

• N. Botros, HDL with Digital Design. Bloomfield: Mercury Learning & Information, 2015. ISBN: 9781938549816
• S. Hugg, Designing Video Game Hardware in Verilog, 2018.

Online Ressources:

• https://www.fpga4fun.com/HDLtutorials.html
• A general bibliography with Verilog books: https://www.verilog.com/v-books.html

Well, I started with:

Books:
"Verilog by Example" by Blaine Readler ISBN 978-0-9834973-0-1 (but this was a bit abstract)
"Programming FPGAs - Getting Started with Verilog" by Simon Monk ISBN 978-1-25-964376-7

And I had started with a simple board from here: https://www.nandland.com
He created an linked to some good basic videos, and gave some decent overviews.

And of course, anybody just starting out with FPGAs should take a look at https://www.edaplayground.com to see what a simulation is, if you have some very simple HDL code to test.

...But in the end, these things just teach you rules... You can either struggle to reinvent the wheel yourself and create programs from scratch, or take a look at what somebody else has done, and roll up your sleeves.

I would not recommend writing something from scratch as your first project; better to look at somebody else's work and try to fix a bug or two.


EDIT:
I forgot to add... I studied up on Verilog, then the first two cores I wanted to work on were almost entirely in VHDL.
So, you should also be flexible.

https://8bitworkshop.com/v3.5.1/?platfo ... l_paddle.v
https://hdlbits.01xz.net/

Right now Springer offers over 400 book titles for free (for a while, the offer is time limited)
https://paulvanderlaken.com/2020/04/24/ ... e-covid19/

Quick Start Guide to Verilog
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/ ... 30-10552-5
Introduction to Logic Circuits & Logic Design with Verilog
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/ ... 30-13605-5

Quick Start Guide to VHDL
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/ ... 30-04516-6
Introduction to Logic Circuits & Logic Design with VHDL
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/ ... 30-12489-2

I found this site quite useful as a simulation environment for checking basic verilog things out:

https://8bitworkshop.com/v3.5.1/?platform=verilog

Great for testing state machines or quickly checking some logic... It's an open source product too, and I have wondered if it might be possible to make it into a MiSTer specific setup. For example, we could make mocks for the MiSTer 'sys' folder and DE10 nano hardware. But I think there are a lot of limitations with this IDE, I ran into problems with logic involving numbers bigger than 32bit if I recall...

A book that I am currently using and that I am finding very practical to use Verilog at the synthesized level, with many tips and practical examples is:
https://www.amazon.es/FPGA-Prototyping- ... B00HLHWWGA
Although it is oriented to Xilinx FPGA, almost everything is applicable to an Altera FPGA.

RndMnkIII wrote: ↑Fri Jun 19, 2020 6:29 pm A book that I am currently using and that I am finding very practical to use Verilog at the synthesized level, with many tips and practical examples is:
https://www.amazon.es/FPGA-Prototyping- ... B00HLHWWGA
Although it is oriented to Xilinx FPGA, almost everything is applicable to an Altera FPGA.

I have the VHDL version of that book, and it's excellent.

It even has a nice section on how VGA works and how to generate video signals properly.

So... many of these books look good. It would seem the "free" access is over? I can't tell.

Pertinently, tho, Some of these reference the ARTIX-7 (which I have one to play with), but it would be more topical if there were some books and resources here that dealt specifically with the DE-10 and with Quartus.