One really great way to think of MiSTer is as a living documentation project that results in documented and working system hardware vs MAME which is focused on

One really great way to think of MiSTer is as a living documentation project that results in documented and working system hardware vs MAME which is focused on documenting working system software. It just so happens if you have working hardware you can run the software meant for it (MiSTer) and from the other end if you want software to work you need a pretty good idea what the hardware is supposed to be doing. They're basically similar efforts but approaching the problem from a different point of view. Given how hard FPGA programming is, the work in MiSTer is quite magnificent.