MiSTer FPGA book
If somebody has no understanding of FPGA and considers entering this engineering area, what would be the appropriate reading? I do not understand why I cannot find such book. It seems to be as simple as adapting existing FPGA book to MiSTer FPGA. Whoever does it first, wins.
For me, computers were always a dualism of ability to play and ability to program. I was running Secret Agent, playing, exiting to DOS, opening Turbo Pascal and wanting to program something myself too.
Naturally if I am considering FPGA enginnering, I only view similar dualistic approaches. But I fail.
What do I know about FPGA? There is BORPH OS, and operating system with "software processes" and "hardware processes". What target does it support?
>The NetFPGA is a PCI card that contains a large Xilinx FPGA, 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports, Static RAM (SRAM), Double-Date Rate (DDR2) Dynamic RAM (DRAM)
Alright. NetFPGA then.
Let's move further. Prof. Niklaus Wirth has a course of FPGA engineering. Long ago he engineered Lilith PC and wrote Oberon OS for it. But Lilith PC is legacy, and his course of FPGA engineering was updated to FPGA. Guess which?
Digilent Spartan-3!
So to follow the FPGA course of Niklaus Wirth I need to buy Digilent Spartan-3. And why would I do that? What else can I do with it? There is just one interesting operating system, and display is monochrome.
And I open HDL books, and look what is their target. Again not MiSTer FPGA. This is the problem. They all want me to buy notably costly hardware, suitable for only one thing, and often not that good. MiSTer FPGA already solves problem of colorful hardware accelerated graphics with tiles, sprites, digital processed sound, network. Plenty of games and old computers.
I can hack all of that. Invent new x86 instruction and use it in Turbo Pascal. Or maybe make fantasy console? Its CPU can be MMIX, like in TAoCP. Why don't TAoCP people think of anything better than framebuffer and why don't fantasy console creators select MMIX as their CPU. MMIX-based stuff may ring some bells in Stanford and Munich.
I can see no reason to want anything but MiSTer FPGA as first and only FPGA setup. And if I program something interesting for MiSTer FPGA, my chances to present it to somebody else are higher than on all other boards. All roads go to MiSTer FPGA. Well, at least all FPGA starters' roads go to MiSTer FPGA. Then why I enter "MiSTer FPGA book" into search engine and cannot see anything sensible.