A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

An FPGA, for the most part, is a massive piece of silicon that contains a boatload of what are known as "Logic Elements", each of which can accept a set of inputs, and generate a set of outputs based on a lookup table, which are dynamically "wired" together by *software*.

The bitstream that gets uploaded to an FPGA, unless it's concretely set in some ROM, is ostensibly software. It can be changed at run-time to configure the functionality of those logic elements. It is far more akin to software than even firmware.

When a CPU runs microcode is it hardware or software? If someone turned the verilog into an ASIC is it still software?

If someone turns the Verilog into an ASIC, is it suddenly a more accurate representation of the hardware?

No. But if the verilog was derived from a chip decap it is.

If that information is plugged into an emulator running on a PC, you now have an emulator with the same level of accuracy. People treating FPGA emulation like some kind of religion act as if it's accomplishing something PC-based emulators *can't* do, and that's not the case.

Quite a number of drivers in MAME exhibit accuracy flaws that are there not because they *can't* be solved, but that they *haven't* been solved. It's like trying to claim SNES emulation is terrible by comparing a real SNES to ZSNES when Higan is a fucking thing now.

Yet the FPGA crowd like to act as if it's a "can't" situation rather than a "hasn't yet been", situation - and the people working on FPGA-based emulators, for the most part, are going closed-source in order to actively *prevent* open emulators from getting at helpful info.