June 4th Update

Well, finally got this rolling a little bit, installed mandrake linux on my slot PC. I did a custom install and tried to minimize the number of components installed (though as this was the development partition, it does still have a lot of other things on it). The machine is PC is really all housed on a single ISA Board, and I've been able to run xmame on it. I'll post the stats on the machine once I figure them all out. So far this is what I know, I'm able to run xmame on a Pentium MMX 233 and get Donkey Kong 3 and Galaga to work well without sound. I'm also able to run them without starting a window manager (just from a default xterm after starting the x server with xinit). I'm also going to attempt to get both of those to run with a 486 Cubix ISA PC that I got off eBay a couple weeks ago. The problems I see now are that I think to minimize the size of everything, I'll have to develop a custom Window manager of sorts for this to work properly (on top of the custom interface I'm theorizing). The Hard drive on this machine has a 128meg partition for testing, and a 32 meg swap partition (in addition to the 3 gig development partition, and 128 meg primary swap). We'll see if that will be enough (I'm going to get the whole system functional on the 128meg partition and then try to trim it down to 32-64 Meg with 16Meg swap, and only 16-32 meg of RAM (I'm using 64 right now). Well, that's enough rambling on for now, I'll try to stick to only the things which have actually been done on the next update