Where can I find details and history of the Amiga hardware?

[xeron]

If you're going to make a new "kick-ass" Amiga emulation from the ground up; make sure its designed to be cycle-exact (for all chips) from the start, with correct priorities for bitplane, copper, blitter, sound,  sprite, and processor DMA.

Emulating the Amiga is not as simple as emulating a spectrum, or even Atari ST for that matter. The Amiga has a unified memory architecture, where several chips can DMA to and from [chip] ram. It has taken many, many years of work with very talented programmers to get UAE to a state were most demos and games work, due in no small part to the interactions, and timing of interactions between these chips. The only way your emulator would have any advantage is if everything is cycle-exact.

[xeron]

I intend to design it to be cycle-exact, i.e. true emulation

Well, good luck! Especially since the number of cycles the CPU takes to execute code, or access data in chip ram depends on what else is accessing it; Disk drive, audio, bitplane, copper, sprite, and blitter DMA, CIAs, and other events can all hold the processor while they do their thing, and everything is tightly integrated and interwoven.

While you will have to break the emulation down into modules, to keep it cycle exact means that the modules have to be tightly integrated, with proper bus arbitration to ensure that all the demos and games work. I don't even know if there is accurate documentation of all the cycle timings is out there. Certainly talk to the UAE and CAPS teams as they will have invaluable information about this.