[manticore] A few questions

[Jeff Mrochuk]

On Wed, 2002-06-05 at 19:10, Bloodwars at aol.com wrote:
> 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?
> 

There's a Quartus II web edition v 2.0 available for free on Altera's
site.

> 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 ;)
> 

We do have everything pretty much defined.  This may not be clear on the
web page, but we've done a lot of communicating on what features we're
going to have.

In retrospect we probably should have done some C/C++ testing for alot
of our algorithms to make sure everything works, but things worked
themselves out.  

At the moment we're working on increasing the flexibility and feature
set of the design.  Basically we have a decent, but simple 3d chip,
which can render, but only at 8bit color and a fixed resolution.  Once
we increase the flexibility, and add communication (via PCI) we'll be in
good shape.

> 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
> 
> 
No problem, your input is welcomed.

Jeff