What is FPGA and what is it trying to offer over Emulation? I have my Saturn hooked up to my Retro-Tink and it's great but if I can get full support for all my JP titles and such as well through another system I might be down.
Laymen explanation incoming.
An FPGA stands for "Field-Programmable Gate Array." It's a programmable chip that can become whatever you want it to. The people behind this prototype have studied the Saturn thoroughly, its schematics, its various chips down to the transistor level, and have applied that knowledge to program this FPGA to be a Saturn. If it's programmed well, for all intents and purposes that FPGA IS a Saturn and will act like one highly accurately, quirks and all.
You can think of it as hardware emulation versus software emulation, with the explicit goal of recreating and preserving the original experience as accurately as possible. FPGA poses a number of advantages over software emulation: it's very low power draw (PARTICULARLY in light of its accuracy), it's adaptable and can be used to accurately recreate multiple systems (although in the case of this prototype, just a Saturn), and because there's no software emulation translation layer to interpret instructions between the actual hardware and the emulated hardware, there's zero latency. Prototypes like this can also use your discs. It's thus an attractive possibility for anyone that wants to accurately recreate a retro gaming experience with their own games and controllers on an HDMI equipped set with zero latency.
You may have heard of MiSTer kits or Analogue consoles like the Super NT or Analogue Pocket. These are FPGA hardware.
The primary downsides of FPGA hardware is the cost and availability. A premade MiSTer kit can set you back $500+ (you can build one yourself for much less) and an Analogue Pocket is $249, but good luck finding one at all.
Up until recently, 32 bit hardware wasn't really possible on FPGA, for the most part (some high end FPGA chips and highly skilled MiSTer programmers excluded who have been making excellent progress) the available chips hit their ceiling with 16 bit hardware. Seeing a Saturn prototype FPGA is quite exciting for that reason.
