Re: 65816 emulating a C64.

You're right that Commodore would have used ASIC but they would have invested in FPGA as well. Commodore was already investing in programmable logic technology and ASIC. I think both would have been used in the process. 

> On July 25, 2020 12:14 PM Nate Lawson <nate_at_root.org> wrote:
> 
> A bit off-topic, but I think this alternate history is extremely unlikely. FPGAs are expensive relative to ASICs, and this was even more true in the early 90’s. At that time, MOS was still making mixed-signal chips using an outdated foundry that was little updated from the late 70’s.
> 
> Commodore was going to go fabless, and they actually started down this path with the Hombre project which was going to be manufactured by HP who had also made the AGA Lisa chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
> 
> But Hombre wasn’t reprogrammable logic, which would reduce density and increase cost tremendously. Commodore didn’t care about reusing and upgrading hardware — they’d rather you buy a new system cheaply later.
> 
> There are many plausible alternate historical futures for Amiga, including set-top box, game console, industrial (electronic signs), movie editing (Avid), and multimedia cards (think nVidia + Creative Labs). But none would have been based on FPGAs.
> 
> -Nate