twellys wrote:Dave - I'm splitting hairs, but you could have a virtual machine running RHEL/CentOS on your OS X - My former boss did.
I thought to point that out, but since everything i posted was received as a personal attack, I left this out. With virtual machines it might be better idea to go with Windows version...
But then again, at least my VmWare Workstation-7 tends to performs crappy with really demanding applications. It might work well. Or not.
Brane2 - The CoolrunnerII would be better - more obsolence proof than XL9500 - ready in a starter-kit for $59 - all you need is some cheap as a chips voltage conversion buffers.
He was showing totall averson towards non 74.., so I tried with 9500XL, since these could be almost drop-in replacement for TTL. On a second thought I'd go for XC9500, but Xilinx doesn't mention them much nowadays, although Farnell still carries them.
But then if yu drop that requirement, MachXO2 seem as a better choice. It has CPLD price and basic structure, but many FPGA features. You get internal 18Kb RAM blocks ( ideal for caches!), I2C, SPI, counters/timers, even DDR-II interface. User accessible FLASH even. ( enough for "BIOS" of some kind) And quite a few macrocells.
Ordinary CPLDs get pricey after 144 macrocells. MachXO2 is affordable even at 640 or more...