Part selection advice (SDRAM + VGA controller)

[Entropia]

Hey guys. I have a small hobby project in which I want to draw graphics on a VGA monitor and also need many megabytes of RAM (also to serve as frame buffer for VGA). I've been playing with FPGAs in the university some 15 years ago (Xilinx Spartan-3E if memory serves) but have no experience since then. What would be a good choice in terms of part for my hobby project? Pin count needs to be pretty high since SDRAMs usually have 16- or 32-bit interfaces and the VGA part would also require 26 or so pins for 8-bit color with sync signals. Interface to the rest of the system has not been defined yet but something like QSPI is probably what would work for me pretty good.

I would appreciate hand-solderable parts but if small dev boards are available that would also work. Thanks.

[up8051]

Hey guys. I have a small hobby project in which I want to draw graphics on a VGA monitor and also need many megabytes of RAM (also to serve as frame buffer for VGA)

How many RAM you need?

You can use for example inexpensive module from Arrow with Altera Cyclone:
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/cyc1000/arrow-development-tools (64Mbit RAM).

You also can look at Gowin FPGA  with buid in PSRAM/SDRAM (LittleBee Series).

If you prefer Xilinx:
https://numato.com/product/mimas-v2-spartan-6-fpga-development-board-with-ddr-sdram

And many others ...

[asmi]

Take a look at the project in my signature. That board has HDMI port instead of VGA, but since it's open source, you can modify it to include the port. You can install up to 256 Mbytes of memory running at 333 MHz, giving you up to 10656 Mbit/s of bandwidth, which is enough to double-buffer 720p video in real time.

[Entropia]

Thanks for the suggestions. asmi's Spartan 7 board looks like a promising start to me!