For anyone else curious: custom FPGA-based CPU code but not a custom architecture. This is an RV32I core. The article takes along time to give up this fact.
thanks for saving me the time but it is pretty cool to see i'd love to learn more about fpga my goal is to run very old rare consoles
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Deciding on an ISA like RV32I only sets constraints on your architecture, it doesn't give you any of it for free. So I think it's entirely valid to say that it's a custom architecture if they didn't use any pre-existing CPU design.
Basically, they had the API interface and implemented everything behind it. I think saying that "it's an RV32I core" vastly underrates the design work that goes into actually implementing an RV32I core from scratch.