Thinking about the recent posts on "Emulating right down to the Iron"..and I had an idea, that I first thought was completely crazy, but am now thinking that it may be only slightly nuts.... People have successfully modeled some of the processors using current technology such as FPGA's. What if someone used and FPGA or similar and produced a processor capable of running the instruction set of a specific machine, but was compatible at the PIN (and other HW considerations) of a x86. A standard motherboard (obviously with a completely vustom BIOS) and standard hardware could then be used. Depending on what type of HAL was implemented their might be the need for some custom drivers at the emulated OS level. But this would provide a platform that used current hardware (easy, available, cheap) without any additional layers.... As I said, I thought I was completly wacko when the idea first came up, but I wanted to get the lists thoughts....