Need to do an update, but not much progress, other than planning

Well, i thought i might get some time during the Christmas/New Year break to do some more, but that wasn't the case, what with travelling, and taking the family out almost every day.
So no real progress, how-ever, i did do some thinking/planning & reading.
Firstly, i want to mount the board into some sort of enclosure, to give it some
protection, rather than just having it floating around on the desk, potentially
shorting out on something.
I'll just gut some old piece of equipment for a suitable box, although i haven't yet
found something i'm perfectly comfortable with.
I intend to mount the FPGA board on a piece of scrap blank fiberglass PCB, and then
attach that into the box, i've got the PCB, but no plastic PCB stands to mount the
FPGA board on, despite searching through my essential stock of parts* at home.
I'll get some this week, and get that sorted.

I've also been reading the Xilinx Datasheet for the Spartan 3E, which is something i
probably should have done sooner.
It's a lot more than just a large array of un-committed gates like the old GAL chips
were from when i first studied electronics.
Here's what a typical logic cell in a GAL of that era (mid 1980's) looked like:

And there may have been only 8 of these in a chip (such as a 16V8)





Now compare that to a sample section of the Xilinx Spartan3E:

And there's "only" 4,656 of these in the Spartan 3E (XC3S500E) on my FPGA board.
No wonder i could put an entire VIC-20 in this chip!
http://fpgaarcade.com/vic20_main.htm


Next post, i'll go into some details about re-writing the vga test code, to make
use of the extra bits i've added to my vga adapter.







* essential stock of parts, is a euphemism for what my wife would call "junk"