With regards to emulation and a return to the classics, I got an Open Pandora (http://openpandora.org/) recently and have been having a blast returning to all my old cartridges, type-ins, tape archives, and so on.
My first computer was an Oric-1, the ZX Spectrum, and I have (had) masses of tapes of things I'd done with those machines .. to think those old tapenames are sitting there in a little emu dir, in my pocket right now, for the train-ride .. pure joy of computer.
You're the first person 'in the wild' I've come across with an Open Pandora. Nice to see they've finally got to a point where they're selling them, it was spun out of the old Gamepark (GP32/GPxx consoles) and had a serious amount of emu devs involved.
Yeah I've been there since the GP32 days, and have Pandora #008 (the eighth one to ship) so I'm kinda lucky that way .. and yeah, the emu guys are really key to the Pandora scene, a bunch of them are still kicking out titles and optimizing things extremely tightly.
The Pandora really is a fabulous machine - maybe its too expensive - but to the HN crowd that shouldn't matter much. Its an amazing amount of power in my pocket, and with MOAI now onboard, I have the ability to use it to develop apps for Android and iOS and Windows, and so on, simply by ssh'ing to it and firing up vim. ;)
My first computer was an Oric-1, the ZX Spectrum, and I have (had) masses of tapes of things I'd done with those machines .. to think those old tapenames are sitting there in a little emu dir, in my pocket right now, for the train-ride .. pure joy of computer.