A few questions

[Bloodwars at aol.com]

Aaron Elliott, 19, EE/CompSci major, Virginia

wondering where i can get quartus II... i have electronic workbench if that would work... do i actually have to buy a board from altera for their software?

I was wondering... wouldn't it be a better idea to determine what the card should do before starting a design?  
I can see that this is better in that there will always be a working product, but also see having to rewrite design when limits are reached... I've built a scanner, calculator, and really crappy version of an 8086, and it seems easier to get designs after inputs and outputs are defined... 
Oh yeah, and with inputs and outputs defined, write some algorithms and run it through a nice cluster for four years ;)

Anyways, my two cents, i know some knowledge can be worse than none, maybe once the basics are done, modules can be determined and worked on (ram, controllers, parts of the gpu, whatever outputs needed, etc)

(i'm not heavily experienced in designs of this scale i guess, hoping to learn as i go, hopefully help some too ;)

Sorry for writting too much,
Aaron