One of the best classes I took was building space invaders on an FPGA/dev board. It had 2 PowerPC cpus, an AC97 sound chip vga output, etc.
We built the game in C, wired up the interrupts to the sound chip, wrote to the mapped addresses, etc.
Then we re-did the sound code by writing a DMA controller in the fpga. It was so educational. We had to read and write to the shared bus, follow the commands of the arbiter, send and receive interrupts, etc.
The final bit was a creative assignment, where you could add whatever hardware component you wanted. Some did old Atari controllers, some worked in a separate scoreboard. We did wireless chips via SPI to make it a two player game.
All in, it was one of the best hands on educational experiences. There was no way to complete the class and not have built an intuition for how things work.
We built the game in C, wired up the interrupts to the sound chip, wrote to the mapped addresses, etc.
Then we re-did the sound code by writing a DMA controller in the fpga. It was so educational. We had to read and write to the shared bus, follow the commands of the arbiter, send and receive interrupts, etc.
The final bit was a creative assignment, where you could add whatever hardware component you wanted. Some did old Atari controllers, some worked in a separate scoreboard. We did wireless chips via SPI to make it a two player game.
All in, it was one of the best hands on educational experiences. There was no way to complete the class and not have built an intuition for how things work.