Is anyone here aware of beginner friendly learn-by-building style resources for getting into FPGA programming? Eventually, I would like to get to a point where I could build something like a DCPU-16 or maybe even an rv32mi core.
I wish 8bitworkshop got more love. It is amazing. From the homepage "Write 8-bit code in your browser. Ever wanted to be an old-school game programmer? Learn how classic game hardware worked. Write code and see it run instantly." It lets you get your feet wet in Verilog without buying the hardware first. This description doesn't do it justice at all so check it out.
I was looking for a resource to get started too and stumbled upon this new book. I haven't picked it up yet but liked all No Starch Press books so far.
Nand2tetris, skip around until you find something that interests you.
Fpga4fun is a other good resource if it's still around.
Try and do some stuff besides just another softcore CPU in the beginning, even if it seems redundant. Maybe try a VGA pattern generator with some cosine LUTs or something.
In a game jam a friend and myself turned the Nand2tetris computer into a working computer on an FPGA board with VGA output. Then we built a small game (game and watch level) using the Nand2Tetris high level language. Very fun.
