As Chuck pointed out, maybe the fact that this is
quarter-century-old
technology put together with quarter-century-old construction and design
techniques makes it less accessible to some of the younger members
of this list. Maybe the way to make it more accessible to them is to put
the circuitry on a CPLD, I dunno, I think it's fine as it is.
I don't think that's the reason to put it in a CPLD. The reason to put
it into a CPLD is to make the circuitry modifiable on the fly. Right now
the design puts all of the complexity on the software side. The CPLD
gives the possibility of moving some of that into the hardware side.
It also gives the possibility of using different methods to read different
formats, while retaining the possibility of reading it raw. There also happen
to be some of us that prefer reading schematics to reading code. :)
Eric