I've completed my initial version of Michael Schröder's proposed design for Hack using Olimex ICE40HX1K-EVB, MOD-LCD2-8RTP & Olimexino-32u4. I plan to make a modified version with PS/2 + VGA support using the iCE40-IO expansion board next but I ended up spending a few weeks updating and polishing the docs including entirely new content + test bench for the NS2009 RTP chip which came out in a later hardware revision than what they were originally using.
Some misc photos of the build during development:
https://imgur.com/a/Prd5EIwRetrospectiveCompared to some of the later designs I have seen you can definitely buy more capable boards that abstract away a lot of these implementation details (at a higher cost though probably not that much higher if buying all of the above). The implementation effort required for Hack itself is relatively low compared to writing controllers for all the different ICs/serial interfaces and bringing it all together into a coherent system so your mileage may vary depending on how deeply you want to get into FPGA dev and some of the electrical engineering aspects. For me it was my first time doing any form of hardware dev so some areas required a bit more learning than others on my part.
I made some changes to restore API compatibility with the original nand2tetris API for Jack OS but largely due to the inclusion of the LCD and touch screen it is not really possible to run most existing Jack code relying on Screen/Keyboard I/O without some changes, that is something I hope to tackle more fully in the next version but expanding the spec to a colour screen & touch interface was still interesting to see/implement.
Show me the code!Source:
https://github.com/c0ff33-dev/nand2tetris-fpga
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