I really like having usable, cycle-accurate reimplementations of classic hardware (not to mention modern hardware such as RISC-V). It's the next best thing to running the real hardware, but with minimal storage space and maintenance overhead.
Cycle-accurate software emulators are great (for example people have made drop-in "hardware" CPUs [1,2] which are actually implemented in software on a microcontroller) but FPGA-based implementations are interesting not only in that they create a very realistic and usable version of the hardware, but also because an RTL implementation shows how the logic design could be implemented in hardware.
And modern FPGAs have tons of gates, more than enough to implement an entire system from the 1980s.
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I really like having usable, cycle-accurate reimplementations of classic hardware (not to mention modern hardware such as RISC-V). It's the next best thing to running the real hardware, but with minimal storage space and maintenance overhead.
Cycle-accurate software emulators are great (for example people have made drop-in "hardware" CPUs [1,2] which are actually implemented in software on a microcontroller) but FPGA-based implementations are interesting not only in that they create a very realistic and usable version of the hardware, but also because an RTL implementation shows how the logic design could be implemented in hardware.
And modern FPGAs have tons of gates, more than enough to implement an entire system from the 1980s.
[1] https://microcorelabs.com
[2] https://eaw.app/picoz80/