Very nice Dan! Hope to dig into the FPGA one of these day! Would love to learn more about how the VGA was made to work. I figure I may even be able to do it between you and Bob.

Thanks!

Randy

I'd say go for it. Getting VGA working was actually surprisingly easy. It's a perfect fit for FPGAs. Basically, all you have to do is drive three analog lines (one each for red, green and blue) and two digital lines (one for horizontal sync and one for vertical sync). In a microcontroller getting the timing correct would be terrible. On an FPGA, it's basically just a counter.

Driving the analog lines gets slightly interesting, because FPGAs are digital. It's not a huge issue either, though. You can either hook it up to a fast digital-to-analog converter chip, or just use a resistor ladder. I've been using a resistor ladder so far, and it works fine for simply playing around. The DAC chips would be more general purpose, though, and would make it easier to get more colors on the screen.