There's gotta be an academic graduate level anthropology thesis that could be written with the title "What Is Real?: The Online 'Retro-Computing' Subculture and Its Search For Authenticity."
The whole "no FPGA" thing is kind of funny when you see people reach for microcontrollers to do their video display component, and those microcontrollers themselves often greatly outperform the main CPU. What's the major difference between dropping in an MCU vs an FPGA?
Aside: A friend of mine has reimplemented the whole C64 VIC-II VDP in Verilog ("VIC-II Kawari") complete with a test harness built around VICE, etc, amazing work; it would be so cool to see someone pony up the cash to get something like that fabbed in fresh new silicon. Then we could have a "true" retro video display controller so we can have a truly authentic neo-retro computer :-)
Indeed - I was surprised to see an ESP32 on there, driven over serial, for the video output. That seems an order of magnitude more modern than using a CPLD, much less an FPGA. I am building a VGA adapter for my 68k supercomputer using a CPLD which presents some challenges that would be easy to solve in an FPGA. I have wrestled with that concept of what is retro enough, and there is no simple answer. Sticking with thru-hole is hard enough given the ever declining availability of parts!
The ironic thing is, if this were 1980 and anyone were taking this thing's "fastest" designation seriously, the very first step z80 developers would take would be to figure out how to use the ESP32 as a coprocessor for general computation.
The whole "no FPGA" thing is kind of funny when you see people reach for microcontrollers to do their video display component, and those microcontrollers themselves often greatly outperform the main CPU. What's the major difference between dropping in an MCU vs an FPGA?
Aside: A friend of mine has reimplemented the whole C64 VIC-II VDP in Verilog ("VIC-II Kawari") complete with a test harness built around VICE, etc, amazing work; it would be so cool to see someone pony up the cash to get something like that fabbed in fresh new silicon. Then we could have a "true" retro video display controller so we can have a truly authentic neo-retro computer :-)