> Nobody has put these chips under a scanning electron microscope, catalogued each gate, and then recreated those in extremely verbose Verilog.
I don't think anyone was doing that when iterating on the hardware back in the day, either. Dollars to donuts, the 65C02 was not based on a deep empirical analysis of the behavior of as-implemented 6502s, but was rather produced from modifications to the design spec that the original 6502 was itself implemented from, with the intent of maintaining compatibility with the original design.
Same thing here. An FPGA implementation of the original schematics of the hardware can be viewed as another instance of variant hardware built against the original design, whereas software emulation is simulating the outward behavior of the original hardware without any ability to be implemented directly from the original design at all.
> Even if this extremely-arduous process were to take place, you would likely still be unable to reproduce the analog chips used for audio and video in most FPGAs
Which returns us to the original description of these solutions being mostly hardware implementation via FPGA, but not entirely, as some emulation is still needed.
I don't think anyone was doing that when iterating on the hardware back in the day, either. Dollars to donuts, the 65C02 was not based on a deep empirical analysis of the behavior of as-implemented 6502s, but was rather produced from modifications to the design spec that the original 6502 was itself implemented from, with the intent of maintaining compatibility with the original design.
Same thing here. An FPGA implementation of the original schematics of the hardware can be viewed as another instance of variant hardware built against the original design, whereas software emulation is simulating the outward behavior of the original hardware without any ability to be implemented directly from the original design at all.
> Even if this extremely-arduous process were to take place, you would likely still be unable to reproduce the analog chips used for audio and video in most FPGAs
Which returns us to the original description of these solutions being mostly hardware implementation via FPGA, but not entirely, as some emulation is still needed.