In this paper, with the aid of mutual information and generalized mutual information (GMI) capacity analyses, it is shown that the geometrically shaped APSK that mimics an optimal Gaussian distribution with equiprobable signaling together with the corresponding gray-mapping rules can approach the Shannon limit closer than conventional quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) at certain range of FEC overhead for both 16-APSK and 64-APSK. The field programmable gate array (FPGA) based LDPC-coded APSK emulation is conducted on block interleaver-based and bit interleaver-based systems; the results verify a significant improvement in hardware efficient bit interleaver-based systems. In bit interleaver-based emulation, the LDPC-coded 64-APSK outperforms 64-QAM, in terms of symbol signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), by 0.1 dB, 0.2 dB, and 0.3 dB at spectral efficiencies of 4.8, 4.5, and 4.2 b/s/Hz, respectively. It is found by emulation that LDPC-coded 64-APSK for spectral efficiencies of 4.8, 4.5, and 4.2 b/s/Hz is 1.6 dB, 1.7 dB, and 2.2 dB away from the GMI capacity.