[EvanAnderson]

I wanted to learn about Verilog development and to get a better understanding of what's happening on chips. To that end I bought a MiST FPGA-based computer: https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-board/wiki

It's Altera Cyclone III-based. The MiST wiki says the free "web edition" of the Altera "Quartus II" development environment is sufficient to develop for the unit (albeit I haven't actually gotten around to doing anything with it yet).

I can't say how the MiST board stacks-up to dev boards from FPGA manufacturers. I may be going about this the most wrong way possible, but here was my rationale: I was attracted to MiST because tutorials were available for it (https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-board/tree/master/tutoria...), and because the device could be usable as a retro-computing platform if it ended up being unusable for me for anything else. (Chalk that up to rationalization of the purchase, I guess.)