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how about cplds

are cplds okay

you can get currently-manufactured cplds for under two bucks

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/cplds-complex-pro...

and probably nobody is going to say that an lc4032ze or an atf1502 is faster than a z80 (i mean, it's literally faster, in the same way that a 74hc04 is, but you sure aren't going to emulate a z80 on it)

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The trouble with CPLDs in my experience is the software environments and (for some at least) programming hardware.

Especially for the Atmel 15xx parts, the software is windows-only, old and annoyingly crash-prone. The GALs are at least programmable from modern OSes with commodity programmers.

That said, the CPLDs themselves are good chips, and I don’t think especially inappropriate for a vintage project

well, on the plus side, the cplds are thoroughly documented, right? no struggles to reverse-engineer bitstream formats or programming waveforms. so you can write your own software to program them however you like

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