[astrange]

Many people think an FPGA is automatically accurate emulation because it's "hardware" and the original console is "hardware".

But the FPGAs are based on C software emulators because that's where all the knowledge in the world of how to emulate the original system is kept. You can't translate original hardware to Verilog and skip the figuring out how it works process.

[robinsonb5]

There are a very few cores which are derived from die shots of the original chips - but in the majority of cases you're correct.

[astrange]

Most of the time die shots are used to extract data tables or firmware from ROMs rather than logic. But it's probably happened a few times.