Disclaimer: Autism ahead.
Thing with drives is, they are (and almost always have been) little systems by themselves. This is especially obvious with the Commodore 1541, the original C64 floppy drive. It has the same CPU as the C64. Floppy drives, hard disks - they are external units the computer interfaces with, even when they happen to live in the same case. That's why I don't really feel it takes anything away to replace them with modern and more convenient solutions if they aren't particularily interesting by themselves. Sure, some of the modern microcontrollers could easily run circles around the main CPU of the system they interface with in raw processing power, but they have such a specific role and are often so fundamentally different in architecture that I don't think that it matters. I also have an HxC and flashfloppy-flashed Goteks and use them as well, don't miss the old drives. ( btw. for people like me that didn't know, they're basically almost the same thing now. You can even put the HxC firmware on Goteks although you don't really need to anymore as they are equivalent. The excellent Amiga disk selector tool for HxC also works with flashfloppy-flashed goteks now which makes them very nice to use)
Then, almost all these old graphics chips output a digital signal originally, which then gets converted somewhere else to an analog signal, which made sense then.That conversion often was not state of the art, even for the time. Analog video is hard, getting it right even harder. We just grab the signal at a more convinient spot with the Pi and bypass that hot mess. Doesn't really change anything about the system and the Pi isn't part of it, as little as an OSSC or modern monitor becomes part of a PC you hook it up to. Somehow I feel if it wasn't a cheap Pi but some fancy FPGA thing for three hundred bucks, people would feel better about it. Is the Vampire still used/developed?
In my highly autistic opinion, as long as the core computer is original or at least has expansions that fall in line roughly with what was available at the time performance-wise and also don't get there via layers of emulation and abstraction, it's authentic enough. The Pistorm crosses that line for me quite clearly, for obvious reasons. But people are so desperate to get long and pointless benchmark bars ouf their Amigas, so I guess it's fine if they enjoy it. So in conclusion, if you follow my branch of retro beliefs, the PiStorm is haram, while e.g. an accelerator with a modern FPGA for glue logic, somewhat modern memory and e.g.
MC68SEC000 is halal, even though its technically a much more modern processor from the later 90s. Also everything that just interfaces with the system without replacing integral parts of the core chipset is fine. Of course this is completely based on feels and not on facts, as every good belief should be.
Wish I had one of those, but these weren't really a thing in Germany. Only way would be to import one from the UK for ebay prices and I don't trust my chances there. Closest I come to the brit market is a Schneider CPC 464, which is basically just a rebranded Amstrad machine. The only thing that was really localized in a different country I own (althought not really) is an east german
Kleincomputer KC 85/3 made by the eastern bloc
VEB Robotron, the U880 in that system is basically a reverse-engineered, east germany manufactured Z80. Why the OS of that thing and even the labeling on the case is in english considering nobody there spoke english will always be a puzzle to me. Oh well, at least I can always build a Speccy.
