I just bought an
Intel Atom D525 to use as a dedicated retro arcade/computer/console machine... a mini-ITX machine makes it easy to move from room-to-room and place-to-place and emulators do not require a LOT of power to run at 100% speed.
This one is duo core and fanless, so I coupled it with a 64gb SSD drive to keep it noiseless. The 3.5" tray houses this 2.5" drive and provides frontside ports for a variety of memory readers (which is really convenient for 2gb SD cards to interchange with my uIEC drives to play on real hardware).
Plus, this Atom mobo comes with a parallel port (even though I bought ZoomFloppy, too, I have a XA1541 parallel adapter), so that got me to install the OpenCBM drivers for it today. Command line testing of it worked like a charm.
I recompiled latest VICE (took only 5min 38sec to compile for both SDL and GTK binary builds). I keep forgetting to 'turn off' true drive emulation when enabling use of VICE peripherals as 'real device access'. But after that toggle, I am able to use real CBM drives off that parallel port adapter.
This boxed mobo/CPU was so inexpensive, I have to consider purchasing another to keep as a spare.
EDIT: I just loaded the latest nibtools and was able to nibble-copy my original copy of
Adventure Construction Set floppy. Awesome, it runs perfectly hitting the EA half-track copy protection scheme:
x64 -truedrive -autostart acs.g64