> What is a reasonable process for making your own boards these days,
>or is wirewrap still it for prototypeing?

I still vouch for wirewrapping as other processes are (I feel) too
time consuming and not that reliable...
However, do note that the cost of wirewrap materials (especially the
IC sockets) can blew away most budget.

>Are FPGA something I can think about using? I have no idea of the
>reality of this sort of thing, but the idea of specifying what you
>need and plugging it into a socket instead of building it out of a
>pile of chips is compelling.

If you are looking for simple glue logics, I would suggest PLDs.
It is very well suited for state machine design though not so
optimised for combinatorial logic. Furthermore, software tools for
PLDs are cheap.

FPGA design & programming tools tends to be expensive, as does the
device. You don't really want to look at this unless you need
1000 and above, logic gate equivalent. Entry level FPGAs starts with
2000 gates equivalent and it would have been an overkill.

Hope this helps,

Peter Tiang
Design Engineer