I've always wanted to get more involved in emulation and this seems like a perfect scene to get involved through
The workflow of testing new cores on AP if you don't have Developer Pocket seems kind of nasty.
For a beginner, the Pocket is definitely easier. With MiSTer, you're building a bunch of other framework code that isn't your own, and that adds a lot of iteration time. I also think the Pocket APIs are more refined, but also more limited. I've already written some info about this - https://www.reddit.com/r/fpgagaming/comments/1318jsr/tamagot...
I’ve managed to make the 4 LEDs on my Digilent Arty board ping-pong back and forth like the power indicator on the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers, debounce the buttons and switches and set up clock division to produce different frequencies from the hardware clock. That’s taken me a handful of days in my spare time.
I started ~7 months ago with approximately no FPGA or hardware experience, have now ported ~6 cores from MiSTer to Pocket, and just released my first core of my own, the original Tamagotchi - https://github.com/agg23/fpga-tamagotchi/
If you want to join in, I and several other devs are very willing to help talk you through it. We primarily are on the FPGAming Discord server - https://discord.gg/Gmcmdhzs - which is probably the best place to get a hold of me as well.