This has been a fascinating thread.

I was kind of surprised that no one came out and said "yes, 9front all the way", nor did anyone say they had 9atom working.
Ideally, I'd like to have 9atom on VMware, but since it isn't maintained anymore either, 9front looks like the way to go.  9legacy might be truer to the original, but it doesn't work on VMware out of the box.  I know VMware isn't the favorite virtualization platform of everyone on here, but there's a lot of production on VMware...