VGOEmulator.net

I've googled the hell out of this, and I'm still not sure which direction to go in. I have been having a blast hosting my own EQ server. Only the wife and I play it when we can. It's always been on my computer because, who cares. No one else is ever going to log in. BUT...as anyone knows who plays MMOs, certain quests items or drops require you to camp spawns and kill the mob multiple times before he will drop it. The issue here is, I just build a beast of a computer, invested over $5k with all the bells and whistles including directional lighting, water cooling, and the latest greatest hardware, so I have ZERO desire to keep it running 24/7. So at night I shut it off, which of course, shuts down the "server" thus resetting all the mobs.

So I've been chewing on making my old computer a home server so I have it running 24/7 and don't have to ruin the spawn times. My issue is, do I HAVE TO use server hardware such as Windows Server, Linux or NAS4Free etc? All I really want to do is access the game a few times a week. Not stream movies, not using it as storage, just run any EMUs I have off of it.

What is the best way to go about this?

You could do 1 of 2 things:
For just the purpose of you and your wife, you can turn most PCs into Linux (NOT WINDOWS) boxes. Windows is OK, but needs to be restarted more (in general) than Linux. The other factor is how much the emu leaks, if any. Leaks will cause it to eventually have degraded performance and then crash, needed a restart.

You don't need specific hardware. You can probably use a PC from 10 years ago to support 2 players.

Number 2 is modifying the Emu to save, periodically (if you are worried about power outages or crashes) or during an Emu Shutdown process, all the timers for mobs, and set the timers to the specific ticks upon reload. This, imo, is more headache than just setting up a Linux box.

I'm currently using Ax Classic repack, which is basically a one clink install, a few edits to the XML, and your up and running in less than 10 minutes. Of course that is Windows based, so not sure if its even possible to install it on Linux.

I also considered using a cloud server from a company, found a few free ones, but I'm not sure if you can access the game like that, and again, its Linux based, to not sure how to even start that.

Run the emulator inside a virtual server that supports snapshot dumps.