Vga on an Fpga

I spent the evening fiddling with my Mercury 2 FPGA. I also have the Mercury Baseboard that has a VGA port (among other ports) broken out. I connected it to my monitor and started to figure out how to make it draw something. Anything would do, so I went searching for a VGA on an FPGA project that I could follow.

I found one here. I had to make slight modifications to it to make it work with the Mercury 2. It was fairly easy to do in Vivado. The main changes were to use the Mercury Baseboard constrints file instead of the one from the Mercury 2. That ensured that the onboard peripherals would be mapped correctly.

After spending a few hours working with my various FPGA development boards, I have determined that the Mercury 2 with the baseboard is the most approachable of them all. I was able to get it working with the latest version of AMD/Xilinx Vivado.