Schedule change. Today's project is to see is qemu running a big endian PPC delivers acceptable performance for testing software in a bigendian environment. I could retire an old Mac Mini PPC running Debian.

What kind of FPGA package were you previously using?

Many FPGA CPU simulators attempt to be cycle-accurate for the purpose of architecture development, where the emulator has the leeway of treating instructions as atomic units and abstracting the rest.