[mschuster91]

> It's also not a total solution: by taking many more transistors to programmatically simulate just one, it limits the maximum scale and frequency of what it can support. N64/PS1/Saturn has not yet been fully supported and is still theoretical, but likely, to be possible. Going beyond that is not possible at this time.

The limiting factor here is the amount of stuff you can throw into a single FPGA, correct?

So in theory, shouldn't it be possible to tie a bunch of FPGAs together, with two beefy ones being responsible for replicating CPU / GPU functionality, a couple smaller ones for sound and other "helper" processors, and some bog-standard ARM SoC to provide the bitstreams to the FPGAs and emulate storage (game cartridges, save cards) and input elements (mainly "modern" controllers)?

[near]

There's both a cost and a speed barrier to it. FPGAs are often used to design, simulate, and test modern circuits at sub-realtime speeds. No amount of FPGAs will get you a PS2 emulator at playable speeds right now, let alone a PS3/Switch emulator. PCs can do that today by taking shortcuts such as dynamic recompilation and idle loop skipping.

[vardump]

Hmm... looking at the frequencies and gate counts, I think PS2 is well within realm of possibility to run on a not-so-cheap FPGA (or several). But PS3 generation consoles definitely not.

[duskwuff]

> The limiting factor here is the amount of stuff you can throw into a single FPGA, correct?

And the speed that you can get your design to run at. Something like the Game Cube (PPC750 @ 485 MHz) would be difficult to implement in an FPGA, for example.