there are enough baremetal emulators out there by now that show that you can definitely run emulators without any OS. BMC64, PiStorm/Emu68, just to name a few

there are enough baremetal emulators out there by now that show that you can definitely run emulators without any OS. BMC64, PiStorm/Emu68, just to name a few Just because emulators often run under an OS doesn't mean that software emulation is inferior to FPGA emulation.