I don't really know if this is a stupid idea or not, I don't really have hardware experience. But the older systems, say NES, SNES, Genesis etc are pretty simple systems. Patents also have a lifetime. Why aren't we getting recreations of the hardware via a SOC sold that near-perfectly emulates the system? The FPGA projects are as close as I see this happening, but FPGAs are pretty expensive I imagine compared to some 40 year old cpu design and 1kb of ram.
We do, sort of. There are ASIC based clones of the NES, SNES, Genesis, GBA and GBC. Hyperkin for example sells a few, the SupaRetron HD is an ASIC based SNES clone, the MegaRetron HD is an ASIC based Genesis clone. Some Chinese companies have Game Boy Clones (e.g., GB Boy Colour). They aren't perfect because they aren't perfect 1:1 reverse engineered chips and nobody seems willing to spend the money to fix all the bugs, but they can be pretty close. The main benefit of the FPGA systems is that bugs can be fixed and they can do more than the real systems if need be like scan line emulation.
There technically is also a path from FPGA to ASIC so you could use a FPGA for dev and test and at some point if it makes sense make a volume product based on that FPGA.
It's been done before. Lots of 90s bootleg consoles used clones of the Famicom/NES chips, though they weren't particularly accurate clones. The Commodore 64 Direct-To-TV of all things had a custom ASIC made for it in 2004.
I think these days FPGAs have just gotten cheap enough that the economics of making custom chips doesn't make much sense for the volumes these kinds of products tend to sell.
I imagine there's a huge difference, legally, with black-box reverse engineering and then creating a very similar design on an FPGA (what I did here), and actually fully decapping the chip and cloning the gates.
Plus FPGAs add a lot of flexibility (e.g. multiple systems, enhancements), and they're really not that expensive. Especially in relatively low volumes compared to an ASIC.
As I understand it this has already been done for several systems. The first time I saw such a device it was one of those bootleg "100 Games In A Joystick" things that Ben Heck tore apart because it contained a glop-top "NES on a chip".
> FPGAs are pretty expensive I imagine compared to some 40 year old cpu design and 1kb of ram.
The MiSTER Pi set me back $180 and is perhaps my favorite purchase of 2024. It'll run almost any system made before the year 2000 and the gap is rapidly closing for lesser-appreciated consoles like the Saturn and Jaguar. This represents a tremendous value; it's hard to argue with that kind of money for an entire century of gaming. I heartily recommend picking one up.
I believe NES patents might be finally all expired and off this year, but the SNES is probably covered for a little longer. Reverse engineering emulators and fpgas has been safer legally speaking for most of the last few decades.
