I'm an old, old, old coder. (How old? I've used paper tape in anger.) I've programmed in a lot of languages and under a lot of paradigms (spaghetti, structured, object-oriented, functional and a smattering of logical).

I'm getting bored.

FPGAs look interesting to me. I have the crazy notion of resurrecting some of the ancient hardware I worked on in the days using FPGAs. I know this can be done because I've seen PDP-10 and PDP-11 implementations in FPGAs. I'd like to do the same for a few machines that are perhaps not as popular as those two, however.

While I am an old, old coder, what I am not is an electronics or computer systems engineer. I'll be learning from scratch if I go down this path. My question, therefore, is two-fold:

1. How difficult will it be for this old dinosaur to pick up and learn FPGAs to the point that interesting (not necessarily practical -- more from a hobbyist perspective) projects can be made?
2. What should I start with learning-wise to go down this path? I know where to get FPGA kits, but I haven't found anything like "FPGAs for Complete Dinosaurs" yet anywhere out there.