I'm sure a lot of you are well aware that one of the issues with collecting computers is that you tend to fill up space extremely fast... Especially when you have whole desks dedicated to computer setups with specific monitors, disk drives, etc. Right now I have 5 computers set up across 3 desks, which in itself was not an easy task, and not all of them are as convenient as I would like... not to mention that I'd still like to set up my XEGS and Atari ST, as well as start up Spectrum, MSX, and X68000 collecting. But I simply don't have the room and I'm up to my eyeballs in cables and disk drives as it is.
The other day, I was toying with the idea of replacing my Amiga 3000 with a cheap PC that would boot straight into WinUAE (mostly because building a new computer from scratch would likely be cheaper than all the outrageously priced Amiga hardware out there). The obvious extension of this is that I could easily use a cheap PC to replace ALL my obsolete computers (not to mention most of my game systems). The plan goes something like this:
- A cheap Atom-based motherboard (like the Intel D510MO)
- 2GB of RAM (Probably tremendous overkill, but whatever)
- A nice small case (like the Apex MI-008)
- A Catweasel MK-IV and floppy drive(s) for reading actual disks
The Atom D510 is more than powerful enough to emulate any 8/16-bit computer, and low-power enough that it can run without fans. Even though I've never really liked the idea of on-board video, I imagine the GMA 3150 is more than capable in this respect. Putting all this together should cost only around $300-400.
So has anyone here tried anything like this? One of my main questions is that of software. Since Amiga is a major target for me, and E-UAE lags far behind WinUAE, I'd likely choose to run Win 7 or XP rather than Linux. Are there any good frontends that would work well for this kind of a setup? Ideally I'd like to hide Windows as much as possible (since it's largely just backend to the emulators), and I'd like to be able to choose from different profiles for each computer setup, and have a consistent experience across all the emulators (same keystroke to exit emulator, same file browser, etc).
Can the Catweasel actually do what I have in mind? Do emulators support it properly to allow me to load Amiga, C64, ST, etc disks? Is a standard PC drive mechanism appropriate? Of course, loading disk images off a hard drive is far more convenient, but I like the authenticity (such as it is) of being able to play off original disks.
--Zero