... and I think I've found the perfect system for it: an old IBM 300XL. It has a 233 MHz P2 on an Intel 440FX-based mobo. Graphics are provided by either an onboard Trio64v2 or (if the card still works) a Matrox Millennium II. All of this stuff looks to be WELL supported. The one question I have is about the hard drive. It claims to be 4.3GB, while the max that OpenSTEP can handle is 4GB. Can I simply create a 4 GB partition and you the remaining 300-something megabytes for a DOS installation or is the 4GB limit a DISK size limit rather than a partition size limit?
Openstep will support larger disks.
People commonly use 9, 18, and 36GB SCSI disks with Openstep.
The partitions just have to be 4GB in size.
Some disks will require a custom disktab (search for disktab entries - there are good explanations)
Awesome... Maybe I can do a dual-boot with OS4.2 and OS/2, two of the pickiest OSes known to the x86-using man (but also the two coolest)
OPENSTEP 4.2 can see the first 8.3 GB of IDE hard drive. But the boot disk can have only one NS file system. Yes, you can use some boot manager to have dual boot. But PC is dirt cheap now. So there is no need for that.
You can probably partition larger SCSI drive. But it is rather complicated.