[neverendingsigh]

As you said, it would be more trouble than it's worth to use, say, an FPGA in place of an original AGB-CPU part. Additionally, our part of the community has an appreciation for the original hardware and components; it's more about being able to rescue parts from damaged PCBs and/or push those original components beyond what Nintendo settled on.

[mikepurvis]

Definitely! Obviously it does increase the complexity of the project for others, knowing that you need a donor system from which to desolder key components. But it's great to end up with a product that's the real system running real cartridges and not a Linux computer running emulation.

That said, it's cool that projects like MiSTer exist, and I could imagine that that might be a nice middle-ground for some people— being closer to the real hardware than purely software emulation, but also something that can also be built from scratch with new, off-the-shelf components.