> The whole system runs on a low-cost development board (Xilinx Spartan-3 by Digilent, with 1 MB of static RAM)
If somebody wants their FPGA work to be available, they better choose MiSTer FPGA from the beginning. Costlier, but way more likely to be found around.
The availability of the board to run Wirt's system was an issue pretty soon. There were even people who offered their own boards to fill the gap (e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20160831063355/http://oberonstat...).
My system version instead runs on RISC-V, so no custom FPGA implementation, currently on an emulator, but eventually on the ESP32 (which has a much better availability).
What do you think about ClockworkPi uConsole Kit R-01, ClockworkPi DevTerm Kit R-01, OrangePi?
I have mostly experience with the smaller (older) boards of OrangePi, and I think they have great boards, some even with a long availability.
> they better choose MiSTer FPGA from the beginning.
Well, the MiSTer project was yet 4 years from being launched back in 2013 when the RISC-5 was implemented in FPGA, so I hope you'd excuse Wirth from not choosing it.
Indeed, I excuse
And shortly after Wirth launched his RISC-5 system, the original FPGA board went out of production.
Which most likely wasn't predictable for him.
FPGAs were never that maker friendly, due to the whole ecosystem.
It probably was NRND on mouser/digikey by then... not that there was much choice in 2013- you went with what you had instead of $1000+ dev boards.