Before you begin, a few words of caution. Building this is beyond the scope of the average DIYer. Yes, this is a project based on vintage 80s hardware, but some components are surface mount, and you must have experience soldering those! That means using a good, temperature controlled soldering iron, different tips for different solder joint sizes, and possibly spoon cartridges like e.g. the C245931 and flux as well as flux remover for SOIC. Oh, and I prefer leaded solder but suit your taste. I recommend JBC or of you’re on a budget the JaBe Chinese knockoffs. Tweezers and good magnifying glasses are definitely required.

You don’t need any special tools or programmers. You do need an EPROM programmer to burn your BIOS or games. And I have simplified the schematics by replacing a lot of gates with two GALs. Yes, old technology, but still available, and tooling is free, as opposed to FPGAs. I could have gone the FPGA route, but then you quickly end up doing everything in the FPGA, and that isn’t very retro anymore. And GALs are more manageable for the hobbyist, if you want to tinker. I recommend the TL866 II programmer, which is also able to burn GALs.

You should have a DVM. A good scope is not required, but can be very helpful to verify everything is working as it should. Even a vintage 20 MHz CRT scope will do. A frequency counter helps too, although these days a scope will do that too.

Finally: get all parts up front. If you’re into electronics, you should have most resistors and caps in your drawers, but some parts are hard to come by these days, and it’d be a shame if the project ended up 95% complete because something wasn’t available.

Most parts are available from Mouser or Digikey, RS and o5her local standard parts sources. Go through the instructions, gather which parts of the project you want to build and then compile your shopping lists.

And it helps if you team up with one or more friends, maybe building one for each? You’ll save on shipping and can fix mistakes together.