After being thrust headfirst into FPGA development thanks to the Analogue Pocket, my first from scratch creation was a gate level implementation of the original Tamagotchi toy.
The core, running on both the Analogue Pocket and MiSTer platforms, lets users re-experience the very first Tamagotchi from 1996 with accurate emulation, but modern features. The core has savestates (which is much harder to do in hardware vs software emulation), high turbo speeds (1,800x was the max clock speed I've reached so far), and more.
Learning more about hardware and FPGAs is something I've wanted to do for many years, and I highly recommend it for any programmer-brained person. It's a very slightly different way of thinking that has vast consequences on how you look at simple problems.
Must say the code was nicely organized and easy to follow. My own code is a bit of a mess in comparison.
Did you try out plain Verilog before going with System Verilog? My plan was to move on to generators like nMigen, now called Amaranth[1], and they spit out Verilog IIRC so decided to learn that for debugging.
Then life happened and got sidetracked, but been wanting to pick it up again.
How was it to program for the Analogue Pocket? I was recently looking at it as just a portable retro gaming device, but if it's easy to double as a fun FPGA platform then that would be great.
[1]: https://github.com/amaranth-lang/amaranth
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