Looking for a MicroController Recommedation

I'm amazed by how many folks independently come up with the same approaches after mulling over things like this. Many of the ideas already bounced around in this thread are very, very similar to what I've been mulling over myself. Personally, I'd use an FPGA to do anything timing-sensitive. I'm probably biased to think that way since I'm a hardware guy with FPGA experience, so it's just what comes naturally to me. I've considered various things to give the FPGA some intelligence, including STM32F series processors, Raspberry Pi boards, etc., but most recently I settled on the idea of using a BeagleBone Black with my own FGPA-based board sandwiched between it and a small LCD cape. My imaginary hardware would be applied towards both interfacing to physical drives to copy vintage media and write downloaded images to blank media, and replacing physical drives with a hardware emulation. In the latter case, the LCD would provide a user interface for choosing media images and so forth. I may or may not ever get around to beginning a never-to-be-finished project to implement this, but it sounds like I'll have plenty of company either way! -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net> http://www.nf6x.net/