alt Hacker NewsIt is a great platform for this, considering the cost. There have been several decent ESP based emulators already, including many consoles, a ZX Spectrum emulator, and even a 386 emulator.
https://github.com/foky26/Retro-Gamer
https://github.com/EremusOne/ESPectrum
https://github.com/hchunhui/tiny386
New chips like the one in the article should be even more capable. 486 won’t be out of reach for long.
One of the big problems has been handling peripheral emulation, multiple controllers, etc. USB plus the other cores should help with this.
I'm thinking of building something that emulates a VT-340 terminal. I can take MAME's emulation of the 80186, the ROM dumps, and have something that just translates the 80186 ROM code into a compilable program, with the hardware behavior informed by MAME's description (which is incomplete for the 3xx series).