Fully Portugese Goose Assassins
So, thanks to the pongmechanik thing, I came across http://fpga4fun.com, which seems like a good idea. I'm not really impressed with the content of the website itself, but they do have some interesting stuff.
I'd like to get some FPGA stuff to play with, it's definately more convenient than buying a brazillion discrete logic chips, even if the end result won't look quite as cool. Of course, although I'd be able to look down upon the poor PIC-using masses if I had several FPGA projects, FPGAs are still rather pricey for hobbyist usage. And much more importantly, all of the software for programming (or more specifically, the place & route) is proprietary, and although there are some free crippled versions out there, they're all for Windows (I don't yet know how well they'd work with WINE). Now, I do know enough about FPGAs to know why a manufacturer wouldn't want to release the information required to do place and route, but that doesn't mean I'm going to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars for SOFTWARE of all things.