> What can’t you do with 50$ SoC that you can do with FPGA in same price range? Among other things... Timing-accurate reproduction of vintage platforms, for m

> What can’t you do with 50$ SoC that you can do with FPGA in same price range? Among other things... Timing-accurate reproduction of vintage platforms, for maximum compatibility with original software and peripherals [1] [2] [3] [4]. Modern full-power desktop processors can do some of the earlier/slower ones, but virtually no SoC-type chips, even the ones in flagship smartphones, have the performance to keep up. The software architecture is like splitting the difference between an HDL simulator and a traditional computer/console emulator, so you can probably guess how slow it is. Conversely, modern peripherals compatible with the original hardware ([5] [6]) can also benefit a great deal from FPGA, since many modern capabilities and densities are only available in chips with more complex interfaces than the flat system bus typically used by old-school expansion slots/ports. Because the host interfaces are parallel (and often directly driven by the timing of reads/writes on the system bus rather than dedicated handshake signals), the required timing is hard to consistently achieve by bit-banging the bus with any kind of microcontroller or SoC (the PRUs in a Sitara might be able to keep up with the raw interface, but are very limited in how much data they can fetch that fast). [1] http://kevtris.org/Projects/console/index.html http://kevtris.org/Projects/console/index.html [2] https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki [3] http://www.fpgaarcade.com/core-status/ http://www.fpgaarcade.com/core-status/ [4] http://c64upgra.de/c-one/ http://c64upgra.de/c-one/ [5] https://github.com/mntmn/amiga2000-gfxcard https://github.com/mntmn/amiga2000-gfxcard [6] https://sd2snes.de/blog/ https://sd2snes.de/blog/