I have an extra computer with P4 and an Geforce 5 series card. What I want to do is make it an emulator for older games (I think it could run everything pre N64 pretty well) and I have some questions.

What Operating system? I'm thinking some sort of Linux distro, but my knowledge here is extremely basic, I want something slim. all it needs to do is run emulators.

What emulators? I have tonnes of roms, but im not too sure whats best to emulate the systems they run on. (Basicly every system pre-1995)

Where can I get a cheap >100 gig IDE HDD? Right now all it has is some crappy 5 gig I dug up to make sure it works.

Is there a good program to transfer large files across nearby computers? I hate to use 20 DVDs to transfer the ROMs.

If you can't help, do you know anyone that can?

So, help?

For the harddrive I would just ebay it, although geeks.com sometimes has decent deals on refurbished drives.

A better solution might be just to network the computers, then the P4 wouldnt need a larger harddrive. It could just run the OS on its 5gb drive and load the roms directly off the network share on the other computer.

I'd use whatever OS you're comfortable with.

And for the fastest file transfer you could just hook up the hdd to the other computer.

It's SATA and the other computer only supports IDE.

As for the OS, I don't want to use windows because I want something that boots FAST, I'm basicly going for a console. However if anyone knows of a program that can help me create a personal version of Win2k or XP with only the needed drivers and completely slimmed down, that would bee cool too.

nLite

And the reason Windows is suggested is because the good emulators are on Windows

Nlite? Alright I'll give it a shot, as for the IDE drive I think I found one, thanks.
That leaves 2 questions- What are the best emulators for any system (Just list what you know, I pretty much have roms on everything) and how would I transfer the 80 GB worth of files, I would rather not share them, they take alot of space.

External drive?
If someone could link me to a cheap one (Project max budget is 60$ unless it's an uberdeal) that would be nice.

And a cheap quiet P4 fan, this thing sounds like a jet.
Budget extended to 100$ with fan.

Okay, I have an extremely stripped down version of win2k now, using 65 megs of ram and booting in 13 seconds. So take that off the list.

The most common linux distros won't boot that fast w/out a LOT of tweaking. That's cool you used windows because you can also use it to play older games that don't run on xp/vista anymore. Also you can use dosbox to run older pc games as well.

I'd try to get suspend to RAM to work. That way you'll almost have an instant-on experience.

I got it working, thanks.