Which FPGA and development board?

There seems to be two big players in the FPGA area, ALTERA and XILINX

I actually agonized for a couple of weeks which way to go, Altera or Xilinx?
But after lots of googling, i came to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter!
Both vendors have extremly capable devices, with limits far beyond what i will probably ever need.
Also, projects written in VHDL or Verilog (the two main programming languages for FPGA development), can be written so that they can be successfully compiled for either.
Opencores.org is a great site, with open source projects for FPGA's that helped a lot, even at this early stage.


So if vendor doesn't matter so much, what else could i base my decision on?

Well i browsed around on ebay, and a few other places to see what was available, there's plenty of Altera and Xilinx development boards available, but most of the cheaper ones required an external programmer for the chip (known as a JTAG programmer) which increases the cost a bit, but obviously can be used for multiple chips.

I did how-ever come across one small development board, that had an on-board programmer, which was at the right price for me also.
It does of course have the dis-advantage that if i get seriously into this, that i'll probably have to buy a JTAG programmer eventually anyway.
The board i chose?
It's called the "Papilio one", to see and read about the board i ended up getting,
have a look at gadgetfactory.net

I also found this brief and nice video review on youtube by Jeri Ellsworth.

If you're into electronics check out her channel also.

So the Papilio one, from gadgetfactory was the one i chose, i did how-ever choose the larger 500K chip, rather than the 250K, the few dollars difference is well worth the extra capability.