You are the man to ask then! I would like one for cramming full of old arcade emulators games....but I'd also like one for xbmc and streaming. Can I do this with one pi? Can they boot into different modes depending on the SD card that's in it?I've got a couple. The first one is running XBMC in the living room and the other is temporarily broken (just needs a little component re-soldered).
It's definitely possible to make a dual boot SD card so i'd be surprised if you couldn't put XBMC on one partition and the operating system with the emulators on the other. I should say i have no idea how to actually do that though. I think it's also possible to have XBMC and the emulators on the same partition and run them using the default linux operating system (called Raspbian) in the same way you'd run different programs in Windows. Again, I've never tried this myself so please don't take my word for it. The raspberry pi forums are a great place to get more knowledgeable advice about this sort of stuff.You are the man to ask then! I would like one for cramming full of old arcade emulators games....but I'd also like one for xbmc and streaming. Can I do this with one pi? Can they boot into different modes depending on the SD card that's in it?
You can definitely do that, although it might get a bit annoying having to faff around with different SD cards all the time. You can get ready made SD images for XBMC, emulators or whatever from various places on the web. For XBMC I'd recommend Raspbmc (it's what I've been using). I'm not very familiar with emulators but I remember reading about Chameleon and thinking that looks pretty good. I might give it a go myself actually when I've fixed the other Pi:If I had two SD cards - one for XBMC and another SD card for games would that be workable?
As in I just stick in whatever SD card I want into the pi depending on what I wanna do?