"Future Proofing" Retro Consoles

A weighted scale would need to be developed to determine such things. Maybe there could be a internationally recognized system for grading these kinds of things, that a regulatory body would implement. Then for a small fee you could send in your item and they would determine just how original it is, then return it to you in a plastic box with a shiny sticker on it. Afterwards you would then have the "right" to sell said graded item for 30x the market price.

For some systems maybe going full FPGA would make sense but for the more modern stuff you would either need one suuuuper fat FPGA or a ton of smaller ones. At least for now it would be "easier" and more "practical" to do a complete redesign of the system adding in all the bells and whistles but using most of the original ICs.

I'm pretty sure the Analogue NT uses a Cyclone V FPGA, but I could be wrong.

 

The later "Analog NT mini" does - the first version (without the mini) used chips removed from old NES/Famicom boards.

 

Oooh nice they've done both! Good people to ask then about how much of a difference there is in development time between the two.

Looks like the mini uses a Cyclone V 5CEBA2U15C8N (it's a bit hard to read in the picture I found). That's a $40~ FPGA with 25k LE's. Granted I believe it's also doing the HDMI upscaling? Probably the same FPGA they're using in the Super Nt as well.

I also found a student project where they had slight success in implementing a N64 in an FPGA. They were using a Xilinix Artix 7
XC7A100T-1CSG324C which is about $125 with 100k LE's. Granted they might have been able to use a cheaper FPGA since that's probably just the one the school made them buy for their class.