[oc] Altera development boards?

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

Hi all,

Does anyone happen to know of any decently priced Altera Cyclone boards 
(EP1C20)?  I have hunted around, and found this one:

	http://www.mjl.com/product/mjlcyclone.asp

... which seems pretty sweet, at least at the price advertised on 
Altera's website ($495).  Unfortunately I have been completely unable to 
actually reach this company, which makes me wonder if it is still in 
existence as anything but a website.

Altera's own "Nios devel kit" lacks VGA and PS/2 connectors, which makes 
it a lot less interesting to me; if it wasn't for that I would probably 
shell out for that even though it's rather expensive.

Why Altera?  Well, it seems Altera's freeware compiler supports all the 
Cyclone devices, whereas Xilinx require the pay version as soon as you 
go over 300,000 gates.  An EP1C20 seems to be roughly equivalent to a 
900,000-gate Xilinx device.

I would love something like this:

	http://www.xess.com/prod032.php3

... but shelling out that much money and only getting a 300,000-gate 
FPGA doesn't make me happy.

The features I'd really like to have:

	VGA
	PS/2
	CompactFlash (or slightly less desirably IDE, which is
		just a standard 40-pin 5V-tolerant header)
	SDRAM or *large* SRAM
	Flash (self-booting is a must)

Anything else is pretty much a nice to have.

	-hpa

P.S. Sorry if this is too far off topic for this list.



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