Hey, There is nothing wrong with how you want to do it. nothing wrong with that at all. Its all in the matter of how you do it and how well you enjoy it.Well, the easiest thing would be to just run MESS on a PC.
It's all pointless nostalgia tech in the end, so there's not really a right or wrong way to do it, but I personally don't want to use an emulator. Running compiled C code on a general purpose CPU seems little different to me whether it's a PC's Core i7 or an ARM chip on a custom board. I really want to implement things at the hardware level, using a real CPU, with the FPGA replacing peripheral chips like the VIA and SCC. I've made some decent progress down that path so far, though there's still a long way to go!
hopefully its all fun in the end. hehe.i just threw an idea out there is all