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Good stuff! Reimplementing old hardware on an FPGA is a really fun and enlightening exercise that I would highly recommend to any CS people with some extra time and patience. I've been working on an FPGA based GameBoy implementation in my spare time (with no prior FPGA experience) and it's been a blast.

https://github.com/trun/fpgaboy

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I couldn't agree more.

As a software developer I've always had a vague understanding of how computer hardware works, but after building fpgabee I have much deeper understanding. eg 1: I always knew what a VGA controller did, but had know idea how. Now that I've actually built one (albeit in code) it's pretty clear to me now. eg 2: I never really understood why hardware can't be just clocked to higher and higher frequencies... but now I totally get it.

* I never really understood why hardware can't be just clocked to higher and higher frequencies*

Can you provide more detail on this?

How did you teach yourself?

Read -> Experiment -> Fail.

Repeat until Read -> Experiment -> Success.

They say experience is what you get when the unexpected happens... so I guess it's the Fail step that's important.

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