[CodexArcanum]

One thing I've been thinking about lately with emulation: why can't we replicate and use the original hardware more easily?

There's lots of knockoff console replicas out there, so it seems like the chips can still be manufactured. Wouldn't it be fairly cheap to build a board/chip that contained either the original chip designs from classic computers/consoles, or hardware-level emulated chips? Seems like you could stuff several of those retro chips onto a single expansion board. Then emulation software could tap into this "emulation expansion board" to make use of the real chips. Is this all crazy talk or does any of that make some sense?

[thristian]

There's lots of knockoff console replicas out there, but most of them are software emulation running on the moral equivalent of a Raspberry Pi, and the rest are often quite inaccurate approximations of the original hardware, with many incompatibilities with published games.

Without access to the original designs, hardware emulation is in the same position as software emulation: you need to do a ton of research and development. A company called Analogue[1] makes FPGA recreations of a few classic consoles, but they're pretty expensive, and took a lot of effort to design. In fact, byuu (the author of the OP) was consulted fairly heavily during the design of their SNES reproduction.

Basically, if you have to do a lot of research anyway, you might as well go with the product that has zero marginal production cost (i.e. software) and save yourself a bunch of manufacturing expenses for the same result.

[1]: https://www.analogue.co/

[CodexArcanum]

Ah, that's good to know! That's a fun fact about byuu helping with the FPGA SNES that they built as well, really interesting! Thanks for the knowledge share!