Let me see now, it must have been about two years ago when this story started. I was bored. I can’t remember why but when I’m bored I often surf ebay just to see what interesting bits and pieces are out there. Mostly it’s the same old stuff repeated over and over. Cheap bare PCB modules from the far east at the low end and chancers wanting $1000 for a broken oscilloscope at the other. This time though I found something interesting. Someone in Sweden was selling a job lot of forty factory-sealed Virtex-E FPGAs for what amounted to two quid each. And they were big ones — the XCV600E-6FG676. ‘Virtex’ is...

Here we have a good example of how a requirement for a simple tool spirals out of control and spawns a project that takes months to complete and ends up dwarfing the project that it was originally expected to facilitate. You see, some time ago I was fiddling around with a project, something to do with data logging, probably, I’ve actually forgotten what I was up to. Said project would have used an MCU to acquire and timestamp data over an extended period of time and I quickly realised that the oscillators and quartz crystals used to generate the clock tree inside an MCU are not accurate enough to track wall-clock time over extended...

A very warm welcome to my most ambitious project to date. In this project I’m going to attempt to design and build a sprite-based graphics accelerator that will function as a co-processor to an MCU. Using cheap off-the-shelf components I’m hoping to achieve a level of gaming performance that compares well to popular commercial hand-held gaming consoles. I’m hoping that I’ll learn a few new tricks along the way, and, if the ideas currently zinging around inside my head all land the right way up and in the right order then I should be able to write a demo or two, maybe even a small game as a proof of concept. Naturally...