Custom Hardware for Libretro / Retroarch

Hi there, i am thinking about a new hardware project and since i enjoy retro arch quite a bit i thought i could create a piece of dedicatet hardware and or VHDL-Code for it. The base idea is to use a SoC like this one from Xilinx: https://lcsc.com/product-detail/_XILINX_XC7Z020-2CLG484I_XC7Z020-2CLG484I_C157624.html

use the A9 dual core ARM for all the non emulator stuff and the FPGA part to recreate the Console hardware to eliminate the need of software emulation. Since the Xilinx vidvado suite takes at least C (dont remember from the top of my head if it also takes C++) code i guess one could use current cores as a starting point for the FPGA dev. To get ones toes wet, one could use something like this and see how the emulator ports would work out.

With all these cheap chinese consoles though i dont know if there is any need at all for something like this. What do you think? Would anyone enjoy this or rather go with a full SW solution which is probably cheaper and more mature? Or probably, does something like the above already exist?

We’ve looked at a few different FPGA opportunities over the past couple of years. The most promising seemed to be integrating with the open-source MiSTer project, which uses the de10-nano board and already has a ton of great emu cores.