How difficult is it for an old-school programmer to pick up an FPGA kit and make something useful wi
- by JUST MY correct OPINION
I'm an old, old, old coder. (How old? I've used paper tape in anger.) I've programmed in a lot of languages and under a lot of paradigms (spaghetti, structured, object-oriented, functional and a smattering of logical).
I'm getting bored.
FPGAs look interesting to me. I have the crazy notion of resurrecting some of the ancient hardware I worked on in the days using FPGAs. I know this can be done because I've seen PDP-10 and PDP-11 implementations in FPGAs. I'd like to do the same for a few machines that are perhaps not as popular as those two, however.
While I am an old, old coder, what I am not is an electronics or computer systems engineer. I'll be learning from scratch if I go down this path. My question, therefore, is two-fold:
How difficult will it be for this
old dinosaur to pick up and learn
FPGAs to the point that interesting
(not necessarily practical -- more
from a hobbyist perspective)
projects can be made?
What should I
start with learning-wise to go down
this path? I know where to get FPGA
kits, but I haven't found anything
like "FPGAs for Complete Dinosaurs"
yet anywhere out there.
