Well, now I have another project once I return home. I bought an IGEPv2 single-board computer, and I'm going to try to put it to good use. It has an OMAP3530 SoC, which consists of a 720MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU, a PowerVR SGX GPU and a DSP, the guts of which I'm not too familiar with. Theoretically the GPU and DSP together can provide h.264 decoding. I was planning on using it as a thin client, light server and light desktop machine.
The wrinkle in this comes from the fact that I also have a Beagle Board. Now, the Beagle is a bit less powerful - its Cortex-A8 runs at only 600MHz, and it has 256MB of RAM and Flash instead of 512MB for the IGEP - but the Beagle can run RISC OS, which AFAIK the IGEPv2 can't. I'm going to do a bit more research on that. For a light desktop, being able to dual-boot RISC OS and Linux would be great. So would the extra RAM, Flash and CPU speed. If I can have both, awesome. If not, then I'll use the Beagle as the ultralight workstation and the IGEP as a sort of HTPC-cum-DIY-game-console. That ought to be enough power to emulate anything up to a PSX or N64 with 480p output, and up to an SNES or GBA at least in 720p or 1080p output. For now it'd be connected to an old NTSC TV or maybe a 24" Viewsonic panel, so that should work just fine.
I can't reasonably use either one to record TV, but then, I don't have TV worth a dang anyway. Either good old UHF (digital, but who cares?) or cable with horrible signal attenuation and noise. So that's OK. I can just drop the tuner card directly into my storage server. Two Opterons probably don't have the grunt to transcode to Xvid on the fly, but again, no problemo.
So anyhoo, yay for projects. In the meantime I just found out I'm on midwatch now, so I'm off to hit my rack. Zuuba zuuba zuuba!