MiSTer FPGA Forum

I've played around a bit with building some simple code examples, outputting basic color gradients to the screen, etc, but want to go a little further. I don't really want to have to swap out the SD card or worry about interactions from all the mister stuff hooked up, so I'm considering a second de-10, or if there's something relatively close in setup/functionality, preferably with video out(hdmi or vga is fine) that I could run basically the same code that could run on the de-10(simple projects, not full mister cores), that would be nice.

Anything in the sub $100 range that would fill this niche?

Everything else is fairly different, with a lot fewer peripherals, and in most cases no ARM processor. So from that point of view, you are best to stick with DE10-Nano based on functionality.

On the other hand, the framework gives you a lot of functionality, and takes away all of the pins...so it really depends on what you are planning to do.

As dshadoff said, it really depends what you want.

If you want cheap then the QMTech EP4CE55 board is hard to beat - it has 32 meg of SDRAM but there's no ARM, and no peripherals onboard but loads of IOs so you'd have to hook up your own VGA / PS/2 / Sound / SDCard - or buy a breakout board too. Oh, and you need a USB Blaster for programming. (The Neptuno and latest UnAmigas are based on this board.)

Another option is the DE10-lite - I use one of these when developing for the Turbo Chameleon 64 (because it's the same tech level but twice the capacity) - so this board had RTG Minimig before MiSTer, before MiST and even before TC64! Again, no ARM, but it has 64 megs of SDRAM, 4-bits-per-gun VGA and plenty of IOs, so you have to hook up your own SD Card, audio and PS/2 if required. Built-in USB-Blaster. This board does have support in a few projects around the web, such as litex and f32c.

Both of those options have FPGAs about half the size of the DE10-nano's.

If you want to use any of the MiSTer framework facilities, then stick to the DE10-nano.

There is the DE0-nano SOC at $99 which is like a little DE10-nano, at some point someone started to port MISTer to it and quite a few cores could run, the exception was the big cores. It had no video output so a special I/O board was developed and had the VGA output. The DE0-nano SOC also supported the SDRAM board.
The project has died and the link to the I/O board is gone.