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Neat. These are similar specs to what I want in a "new" Amiga: Original chipset on an FPGA, modern storage, display and audio outputs, similar (but I don't care about IDENTICAL) case and form factor. Price within "expensive hobby" range - people pay a few hunderd bucks for gold clubs, camera lenses, graphics card etc. There should be enough margin in that range to build what I describe.

Nice to have: The ability to plug in original peripherals; graphics addons like scandoubling, CRT lookalike modes, a mix of original and modern controllers that Just Work.

This way you can take your retro machine, plug it into a modern TV and enjoy retro memories. Ideally you can also take the controller that you spent all your pocket money on back in 1992 and plug that in too.

The only hiccup I see for bringing such a product to market is some IP holder refusing to license some key technology. IIRC whoever owns Amiga has been pretty good about licensing ROMs, WorkBench etc.

The Amiga Reloaded might come close to what I describe for the Amiga, although it's still using original chips: http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/Amig...

The internal layout of those ROM cartridges is really simple.

They can be simple, they don't have to be.
Just like in the NES or MSX it is just a bus connector.
I have a cartridge with an FPGA that sniffs the bus for video chip accesses and replicates a VGA signal from it.
The cartridge is also capable of emulating the drive and/or the entire computer depending on settings.

Also, if they did much research, they might have found that one of the few remaining Amiga hardware peripheral producers has for some time sold floppy disk controllers that I understand are popular with Forensics people, as they can read a very wide variety of formats on a standard PC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/Catw...

You might be interested in this then:

http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/C64_...

"The C-One marks the biggest loss in iComp's company history. It was meant to be a C64 replacement, but Jeri Ellsworth - the original designer of the board - never delivered the cores that she had been paid for. Other people took up that job, and individual Computers created add-on boards to put the C-One into usable condition."

http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/C-One

Seems like Ellsworth had an idea with a little implementation but couldn't deliver a final working product. Or maybe Jens Schönfeld is just another wannabe loser jealous of Ellsworth's brilliance? Either way, his company completed the project and shipped the working board but we still give Ellsworth the credit because she demands it. And because if you disagree with her you're a little person that is afraid of genius.