Electronic – Detect this FPGA board, where to find Schemantics

With an FPGA you can make use of the fact that your flipflops will initialise to a known state and create an internal synchronous reset signal which you can "and" with the external one.

When using an external reset, make sure that you synchronise it to the internal clock (with a different synchroniser for each clock if you have more than one) otherwise you may find that your logic comes out of reset in weird ways. This is because the signal will have different delays to different parts of your circuit and if the reset button is released just before a clock edge, some parts of the FPGA will see it (as the reset signal made it to them before the clock signal) and other parts will see it one clock cycle later (as the reset was slightly delayed and therefore missed the clock edge).

I don't know what your budget is, but Digilent have quite a couple of different boards - and also offer student discounts. We used the Spartan3/3E starter boards and the Nexys2 boards at my university.

A Spartan3/6 board would allow you to do all the basic stuff, and the Xilinx ISE Webpack software suite used for programming it is freely available.