Making a VGA Driver in SystemVerilog

Man, if it weren't for college and pushing outside my major, I wouldn't be nearly as competent in Japanese, and I might not have learned what an arrant douchebag Norman Mailer was, which I did from a professor who loved Mailer! But I have Professor Leeds to thank for teaching me enough about him that I could form my own opinion.

I did a LabVIEW project to run on an FPGA in a college extracurricular. LabVIEW is capable of taking your serial CPU code and cross-compiling it for FPGA but I wrote mine in actual FPGA style with everything being parallel and impressed everyone with the compile/synthesis speed (still 5 minutes instead of 30 minutes) and low area use. Also people thought it was impressive I could control our SPI peripherals with only two virtual toggle switches... their learned helplessness I suppose, it's a dead simple protocol.

Writing code in everything-parallel style takes a different mindset but you can certainly get used to it. Do not fall victim to the trap of learned helplessness. If you can make something in Logisim-NG then you can program an FPGA.

Unfortunately the standard languages for FPGA are ones derived from simulators that run sequentially on CPUs, so for the most part people are writing sequential imperative code and the compilers are pattern-matching for things that can run in parallel. That's why writing VHDL or Verilog is universally a fairly miserable experience. To make it work, you have to think backwards from the compiler - think of the circuit you want to implement, then how to template-expand it into code the compiler can pattern-match.

HDMI accepts DVI signals; all you need is a passive adapter, to connect a DVI-D output to an HDMI input.

Don't dwell on the weight of obsolete history, it'll only prevent you moving forward. Modern displays are better for most purposes.

It's fine to mourn physical movie media, or vector displays, or PEEK/POKE, because those had good sides, but CRTs in general-purpose raster use have absolutely no advantages. They don't need to be controversial like social media or AI.

It's fine to preserve some in a living or dead museum too.

By the way HDMI or DP protocol is not crazy to implement on an FPGA. It's a very similar idea just with bit-serial digital streams instead of analog. Many FPGAs contain SERDES I/O blocks that can take a 24-bit medium-speed digital signal very similar to the one you feed to your VGA DAC, and convert it to a high-speed bit-serial differential form for transmission to the display.