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http://www.fpgaarcade.com/

More focused on older arcade systems at the moment, but since it's powerful enough to "be" an Amiga computer I figured it's probably powerful enough to be a NES, SNES, TurboGrafx-16, Neo-Geo, etc

It will enable you to write real code for an FPGA using a subset of normal F# with some parallel programming semantics. You can download it here. That is, you can write normal F# code and calculate some result as a regular F# program on your pc, then compile the code for the FPGA and see the same output on an FPGA. It's ideal for a software programmer like yourself who wants to get started with serious FPGA programming. There are many good books on verilog and VHDL. For VHDL one of the best is Peter Ashenden's "The Designer's Guide to VHDL". For verilog a good book is Vranesic and Brown's "Fundamentals of Digital Logic with Verilog Design" (they also have a similar book for VHDL).

Xess has a good Xilinx-based started board and great tutorials. As other's have mentioned, Digilent also has some good starter boards. The company was started by a couple of professors from Washington State University. A course that one of them teaches (Clint Cole) has some excellent tutorials on FPGAs. Make sure you get a board with a VGA interface and check out some of the classic arcade game projects implemented on an FPGA (eg, fpgaarcade.com). Enjoy!

For really cool FPGA stuff I'd say look at
http://fpgaarcade.com/
http://www.jrok.com/hardware/wsf/
But I'm a vidgamer so biased :)

I don't know about most people, but I didn't go to school just so I could pay off my student loans, I went to school because I wanted to be an engineer, I was/am looking at work in an education field right now, and you know what they pay? I don't care, because it is what I want to do.

If I was in it for the money, I would have jumped into some high paying field with low entry costs, but I'm not, and I am up to my ears in debt, and contemplating starting work for an open source group in the electrical field, either http://www.fpgaarcade.com/ or http://www.opencores.org/

There are alot of OSS people who would consider your statement of money really silly.

Do you use only existing transistors and processing chips, or do you design your own and then have them fabricate a run of those chip designs before having those installed in your board designs?

Actually, you just use an FPGA. They're completely programmable processors that are very similar in design to static RAM. They can be reprogrammed on the fly, and can represent any chip desired. (Limited only by the number of logic units.) They used to be used only for prototyping due to high cost and low speed, but today they are very competitive on the market. Many a manufacturer has taken to shipping the FPGA instead of paying for the manufacture of a custom chip (usually an ASIC).

You should go purchase an FPGA board and see all of the fun stuff you can program it to do! :-)

I just took an EE course where we used several different Xilinx-based boards. I've put up a load of links and documentation for VHDL and the Xilinx tools here.

The course focused on soft processors, so some of the talk about Microblaze won't apply to you unless you can pony up the $500 for Xilinx's EDK.

Even without the EDK, there are a load of cool things you can do with these FPGAs. Consider this guy's implementation of the original Pac Man hardware on a single chip.

Development of both hardware & software simply continues as time goes on, no matter what. If an original manufacturer pulls the hardware of the market, and games go off the shelves, development slows down, but continues anyway. If the manufacturer/copyright holders try to prevent remakes, emulators, don't release ROMs, hardware info, schematics etc, that slows things down. But they can also promote this, and enjoy having an active community further developing these old designs, like in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum case. Given enough time, all there is to know about the inner workings of these old machines becomes known, and new things are done with it.

I think the appeal to enthousiasts results from the simplicity of these old systems. If you put in enough time, you can write code that uses every single part to the max, doing incredible things with minimal hardware.
One of my favourites is the Sinclair ZX81. 1 KB of RAM, no sound, no colour, and: no videoprocessor. About 3/4 of CPU time is spent on directly writing black&white dot patterns to the TV screen, using some simple logic to turn it into a video signal. With only the remaining 1/4 CPU time left for doing useful things.

With the arrival of quickly reprogammable hardware like FPGA's, the border between hardware and software blurs further, nice example is FPGA Arcade, where old games are rewritten in hardware circuitry. So instead of having a CPU eat through instructions coded in ROM, your joystick input directly affects the logic programmed into a FPGA. Very cool!

You're close... the processing power required to emulate anything (especially arcade games that had a lot of custom hardware built into them) is quite intensive and therefore expensive.

What might be a better option is something along the line of what the FPGA Arcade people are doing. They're esentially replicating that custom hardware in the FPGAs. More hardware cost up front (relative to the actual chips themselves) but ultimately less cost than would be required to fully emulate everything.

Another interesting thing I've seen is like a 10 pack of Atari games built into an original looking controller with RCA outputs. I'm not sure the hardware they're using, but I'm pretty sure it's not emulated. The code may have been rewritten for a specific low-cost chip.

--D