The NeXT community is delightfully dedicated (not quite "Amiga people," but solid) and there are several good online archives of free software, as well as a surprising amount of at-the-time-expensive commercial software where there are negotiated free keys, or other low-cost copyright-holder blessed modern distribution (largely thanks to the efforts of the folks at Black Hole Inc.)
Finding software for white-box x86 OpenStep turns out to be somewhat harder than for the fetishized black-box 68k NeXT machines.
I recently put together a nice ca. 1997 OpenStep 4.2 machine on top of a Thinkpad 560E ($20 machine...plus $80 of accessories/upgrades and $100 worth of SCSI2SD and proper chain of adapters...), which has been a blast. It's happily running (or as happy as OpenStep ever is, its a hair sluggish next to ... basically all of its contemporaries) with full driver support and such. Current fight is that it doesn't seem to believe in netmasks other than 0xffff0000 so it's been a little fussy to have connected on my network.
I've in particular been looking for some decent serial communication/terminal emulation software that actually supports OpenStep on x86 (not just NextStep on black hardware with their various generations of mutant serial ports), I like being able to zmodem files around between vintage machines and kermit is a little cantankerous.
The Amiga parts are expensive and they were not made to last past 10 years. So collecting Amiga systems is expensive. There are emulators for the Amiga that make it cheaper. Even a white box OS http://www.hd-zone.com/amithlon/ to run Amiga programs.
What is there available in NeXT emulation? I went with the Amiga not the NeXT because the Amiga cost less.
I was chuckling at the insane dedication of the Amiga folk, who have at this point built all-new Amiga-compatible 68k hardware far beyond what existed at the time, new generations of system software, modern repro parts for everything, an incredibly robust emulation ecosystem, secured distribution rights for or replaced almost all the commercial software that existed for the platform, etc.
I have an A500 in my collection, they're interesting machines, and fortunately not workstation-expensive.
There are several decent options for emulating NeXT stuff. Previous ( http://previous.alternative-system.com/ ) emulates Cubes and Stations quite well (and its 68k core is derived from Hatari, which is derived from UAE, bringing this full circle).
x86 OpenStep runs well in QEMU (with some careful VM configuration choices) or VirtualBox, there are several guides for setting it up.
The guys that created the vampire accelarator boards for Amiga now have a open source (ish) OS called Apollo OS. It has a hardware abstract layer which hopefully means there will be a decent x86 port.
Finding software for white-box x86 OpenStep turns out to be somewhat harder than for the fetishized black-box 68k NeXT machines.
I recently put together a nice ca. 1997 OpenStep 4.2 machine on top of a Thinkpad 560E ($20 machine...plus $80 of accessories/upgrades and $100 worth of SCSI2SD and proper chain of adapters...), which has been a blast. It's happily running (or as happy as OpenStep ever is, its a hair sluggish next to ... basically all of its contemporaries) with full driver support and such. Current fight is that it doesn't seem to believe in netmasks other than 0xffff0000 so it's been a little fussy to have connected on my network.
I've in particular been looking for some decent serial communication/terminal emulation software that actually supports OpenStep on x86 (not just NextStep on black hardware with their various generations of mutant serial ports), I like being able to zmodem files around between vintage machines and kermit is a little cantankerous.