Yes, a mid-range PC that can run every accurate emulator at full speed will cost more. But a single PC will also emulate every console/arcade/home computer. You don't need multiple PCs to emulate multiple systems. You also don't need an expensive PC to emulate all the systems currently covered by FPGAs (Saturn being the most advanced). A 10 year old, mid-range PC can cover all the systems easily. On the other hand you need multiple FPGAs/modules to emulate around the same amount of different systems or arcade drivers. This will be much more expensive in the end and much less convenient.
My current emulation setup covers more than 50 home systems/consoles and literally hundreds of different arcade hardware/drivers. All in a single PC tower. Good luck setting up all those FPGAs in a single game room, assuming you are rich enough to even attempt it.
You do realize that MiSTer works just like a RaspPi in that you have multiple cores you switch to at the press of a button, which gives you over 30 different consoles, over 50 different computers, and 100s of Arcade games. You can go with a bare board, small case, larger-looking console case, etc.
A PC can do more advanced systems, but the thing stopping an FPGA from doing them is just the cost, along with the development time. The DE10-Nano board is subsidized by Intel and less for less than its sum of parts. The next step up gets to over $1,000 though there are some promising developments from other FGPA makers that could have potential. But so far the boards all have compromises in I/O that make them unsuitable even if the FGPA has more logic units.
But if a PC works great for you sweet. I have MiSTers in my office and in my main entertainment cabinet, along with gaming PCs in both locations. I've played around with emulation since MAME was first released in '97. But it still kept playing around on original hardware until the MiSTer came out and just felt right even after trying out all the "accurate" emulators.
Use whatever is best for you, but why do you keep putting the MiSTer down when according to your posts you don't have one and it doesn't read as you've ever experienced it? When competitive people in the fighting game and shump communities are using the MiSTer rather than original arcade boards, you know something is up. MAME, FBA, etc has been around for over two decades, and while they are great. It wasn't perfect, yes a software emulator can be coded to be 100% accurate. But without full control over the machine (ie OS scheduling), you can't control latency as you said, and that keeps competitive people away.
Another great thing with the FPGA cores being open source is that they are software-defined hardware. Meaning, that we have the full necessary hardware specs to recreate these classic consoles and arcade boards from scratch. The NeoGeo core was originally started because the developer wanted to be able to make new versions of custom chips that were no longer available outside of removing them from other machines. In the future we may have a better way to create custom chips, and well we could easily create new consoles because we have all the hardware laid out for us.
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