There is another interesting path for the hobbyist, based on the Terasic DE10-nano. A group of retrocomputing enthusisasts has chosen this as their base to work upon: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki and it even got picked up by some gaming hardware magazine, earlier this year: https://hothardware.com/reviews/mister-diy-console-fpga

While i don't care so much about the systems they emulate, and the cores they offer, this seems like a nice place to get started because of the many examples one can learn from.

Also Intel themselves offer many tutorials for it, on github and elsewhere.

And it creates an 'ecosystem' of reasonably available hardware expansions, without the usual markup for that stuff, should one need, or want them.

Would i start today, i'd use this. As it is, i've spent much more for similar stuff in the past.

I approve!