So this sort of thing never really made much sense to me, because you could emulate this entire thing on a raspberry pi for significantly less than $500. Can anyone who is enthusiastic about this explain the appeal?
Things like DDR memory abstract all that stuff away. Computers today don't "put an address on the bus and read the data" like parallel SRAM/DRAM; they send a command packet to the memory chips and wait for the data packet to come back. Audio interfaces, especially over PCIe, aren't as simple anymore either. You can't write direct to the screen anymore like you could with VGA cards on old IBM PCs. All these abstractions make computers so complex that one person can't possibly understand it all at once.
Why not just emulate the entire thing on an FPGA from the start and pretend it is simple? Or skip the FPGA and use whatever computer the user already has?
Suffice it to say I just don't get it except as some kind of artistic expression, where even then I think it fails to have coherent vision.
Comparing this project to the Agon is quite the contrast in decisions made and outcomes reached.