An FPGA would be hardware emulation rather than QEMU which is software emulation. For older systems, am FPGA can get you a lot closer to how an older hardware w

An FPGA would be hardware emulation rather than QEMU which is software emulation. For older systems, am FPGA can get you a lot closer to how an older hardware worked by mimicking the actual timing characteristics or by just straight copying the gates into RTL. It all depends on the goal, you may just want to run the software at the same speed like for games or you might want to just see how fast a softcore Z80 can run VisiCalc. With the development of systems like the RC2014, FPGAs and newer microcontrollers or SoCs have made their way into peripheral cards to allow easy connections to modern day interfaces like SD Cards, Wifi, and even HDMI. It takes almost no effort to connect an ESP8266 to the serial port of an ancient computer and send AT commands to access websites and network fileshares.