Toys I almost certainly don't need

[dmaze]

Altera has a MAX 7000 Quick Start Development Kit, which is a board with an oldish Altera CPLD, a programming cable, and some software. It looks like a vaguely neat toy, especially if you have something to hook it up to (choo choo). $99 for the package. The downside is that, by modern CPLD standards, it's on the small side; the 7000 series is a product-term device, and the 7128 on the board has logic hooked up to 128 one-bit registers. So if all of your state fits in 128 bits, it's great, but if not, you need an external memory, and if you're doing that, you could probably use a smaller PLD and build your own board (think 6.111 here)...