Its not exactly an xbox360.... or next gen, but I reckon it will be pretty capable of some good emulation.....
I've been following the likes of Fpga arcade too.... that's taken a long time, but that should be capable of some nifty stuff too..... problem with FPGA's are that its more hardware emulation than software emulation.... and less accessible (almost everyone has a pc) ... so... things take longer to implement..... FPGA's are also expensive if you need one with a lot of real estate to cram in lots of custom chip models....
Things like this are opening FPGA's up though..... http://papilio.cc/index.php?n=Papilio.ArcadeMegaWing
In the future... 5 years ??? I think there will be some kind of happy medium with a mix of both in the end..... Software emulation of some sorts based on an ARM chip, overseeing control of a resonably powerful fpga which has all the custom chips in it doing the hard stuff that takes vast cpu time..... and reprograms it on the fly as required per game.... eg... this game need 3 of these and 2 of these....
#edit# Yes, I'm aware that you can drop an arm core into an fpga, but the cost of the fpga with the required number of gates for the arm would probably cost more than an off the shelf arm chip....and would be a lot slower too than an 800mhz arm......plus you need a lot more gates for the rest of the stuff too...... Unless of course, the FPGA manufacturers cotton on and make some insanely powerful devices with say 1Gig Clocks... and uber amounts of gates/cluts cheap in the future....
(This kind of thing actually exists already, but uses a lowish power arm cpu, and a hard coded FPGA which is stuffed to the gills - and will only manage early 80's stuff... if you know which product I mean, you know its not cheap, but the emulation is damn good - Defo a case of its not what you have got but how you use it !!)
ColinD2013-05-02 19:36:34
