I never had an Intel 8080

… although I spent months tinkering with a Z80 chip in a previous life - long, long ago. But with an FPGA, that can change, at least in the virtual sense: there are several “soft cores” implementing an 8080 chip in a HDL, including memory and peripherals. The light8080 project at OpenCores is one such implementation (in Verilog), and it’s quite an interesting beast because it uses a microcode architecture. Microcode is like “the lowest of low-level stored-program execution models”: it sits between machine instructions and the gates, registers, and memory comprising its implementation.