HP-1000 Minicomputer System (w/DEC RL02) Guidance

Hello everybody, I've always wanted to own a minicomputer, at least, ever since I learned what a minicomputer was in my computer architecture class. Something about the user interface was wonderfully refreshing, of course all we had was SIMH, which is awesome in its own right, but wasn't the same. Anyway, last month I was finally able to pick up a minicomputer (I could afford) off eBay, the HP 1000E/2113E. It wasn't in the best shape, but I've been able to fix the fans, bring the power supply back into spec, and design replacements for the irreplaceable front panel buttons (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:330821). As much fun as I'm having assembling and toggling in trivial programs, I'm looking to get a complete system up and running, something I can run a more-or-less useful operating system on. This brings me to my current problem: It looks like the original system peripherals are very few and far between, and when they do show up for sale, they are astronomically priced. My plan is to put together a system with whatever inexpensive contemporaneous parts I can find, regardless of how sacrilegious it is. I got a hold of two mostly working DEC RL02 disk drives, along with a SCSI 9-track tape drive, and my (pipe) dream is to interface this all to the HP using an FPGA and HP True In/Out card (i.e. HP Bizarro-Bus to TTL converter). As for software, I'm looking towards writing a backend for GCC (understatement x1000) and running FreeRTOS (because I'm familiar with it, I don't need runtime application loading, and I'm going to need to write drivers anyway). Believe it or not, the RL02 interface is probably the easiest part of this project. I've already started working on a design in Verilog that should be able to provide the necessary functionality over a wishbone interface, and I've gotten the drive to spin up and do some simple tasks with just the FPGA controller connected. (Before anyone asks, yes, I suppose one could make the RL02 a really stationary USB thumbdrive.) At this point my question is, has anybody tried something like this before and succeeded (or not)? Are there any helpful lessons to be imparted about the HP 1000 or RL02s or working on this type of project in general? I think I have everything segmented off into a monstrous series of small tasks, but I would love to hear from anyone who has already learned from the mistakes I'm about to repeat. Thanks, Christopher Parish