Acquire any number of FPGA dev boards with a video output. They're not expensive. Then go to opencores.org and browse freely available cores for seemingly everything ... except 3d graphics cores. Theres quite a few implementations of crude VGA framebuffer out, this is a stereotypical Uni-level FPGA class lab exercise (its not terribly hard). There are some opencore projects trying to accelerate graphics but not as much as you'd think. And there's nothing like the thing in the kickstarter.
I hope the kickstarter project is Wishbone compatible so it can talk to any CPU core I'd like to synth and they're not just making a computer card or whatever, and I hope it ends up license compatible with opencores.
The lack of accelerated graphics is a kind of a weird hole in free FPGA tech, everything else you can imagine seems available.
So for example if I wanted to make an ethernet connected stepper motor controlling FPGA based CNC machine controller, which is not so far fetched, every major software component is off the shelf at opencores except for the software I'd write for the synthesized CPU and ... accelerated graphics if I want a 3-d pix of what the machine is doing / done / plan to do. All the rest, CPU cores, ethernet, stepper drivers, PS/2 drivers for keyboard mouse, all thats off the shelf. It would of course be cheaper to use a COTS desktop PC or a rasp-pi but the point is if I wanted to use a FPGA I almost could except for no 3-d graphics.
I hope the kickstarter project is Wishbone compatible so it can talk to any CPU core I'd like to synth and they're not just making a computer card or whatever, and I hope it ends up license compatible with opencores.
The lack of accelerated graphics is a kind of a weird hole in free FPGA tech, everything else you can imagine seems available.
So for example if I wanted to make an ethernet connected stepper motor controlling FPGA based CNC machine controller, which is not so far fetched, every major software component is off the shelf at opencores except for the software I'd write for the synthesized CPU and ... accelerated graphics if I want a 3-d pix of what the machine is doing / done / plan to do. All the rest, CPU cores, ethernet, stepper drivers, PS/2 drivers for keyboard mouse, all thats off the shelf. It would of course be cheaper to use a COTS desktop PC or a rasp-pi but the point is if I wanted to use a FPGA I almost could except for no 3-d graphics.