Programming, first attempt(s)

I've actually had the board for a couple of weeks, before starting this blog, so i need
to catch up with my actual progress.
So here goes....
My first step was to download the Xilinx ISE design suite, the software needed to compile the HDL code, it's a hefty download, but quite good actually,
and is available for windows and Linux (not MacOSX unfortunately but maybe
if i tried it with X11 installed, and i feel like a challenge....).

Once i had design suite installed, like any good techie, i immediately ignored all
of the documentation, downloaded a moderately complicated project,
tried to install it, and failed!
(i tried to get PACMAN going on the board)

Then some commonsense re-asserted itself, and i decided i should take some smaller steps, so i looked for the FPGA equivalent of a "Hello World" program.
Which is actually just to make a LED blink.

After just a small amount of searching, i found this youtube video

Which is a run-through of starting a new project in ISE design suite, entering the code, compiling, and programming it.
I've got two monitors hooked up to my system (i'm a big fan of having two monitors), so i was able to watch the tutorial on one screen, and type in the other.
So i quickly learnt the initial baby steps of how use ISE, compile (is that the right word?), customize the ucf file (user constraints file, which pins connect to what actual physical devices, etc), and get the counter going!

Next task i decided to tackle, was testing VGA output.
Some more searching led me to this page:
Which simply generates some colour bars on a VGA screen.
After realising that the clock on my board was 32Mhz, and in the VGA demo they were using a 50Mhz clock, i was able to get this working also!
So some reasonable progress.

This is only 1 bit for each of R,G,B, (giving a whole EIGHT colours!)
since then i've added some extra resistors to my VGA interface, for 2 bits
for each colour channel, and i should be able to get a huge 64 colours!








That's the next thing i'll tackle, and will be for the next post.
In the meantime, i had another go at PACMAN (but without the copyrighted PACMAN roms)
and i was more successful than my first attempt.

Just a quick edit: yes this isn't PACMAN, but apparently it's an accurate rendition of the hardware of the original PACMAN arcade game, all i would need to run PACMAN, would be the roms (which can be added into the code in the FPGA)
but seeing as how my goal was to take a project, and get it running on my board, then i've met my goal, if i REALLY want PACMAN, then apparently the roms can be "found", but that's not a big goal, for me, so i'll leave this now, and move on.