Hi Prophet and welcome
Just ask if you need some help choosing hardware. As you said x86 is the right choise even if AROS is so portable that it runs on all kind of CPU architectures. Classic 68k, PPC, AMD64, i386 and even ARM. AROS also works well hosted under Linux, MAC or Windows.
The platform that is by far most used and supported also regarding software is i386.
One project that is quite exiting is to make AROS run native on Raspberry Pi. That way we will have hardware that is easy to get, cheap and quite new. It is nice with dedicated hardware. Hardware can be hit and miss. At least when you are in a small platform where no hardware manufactor will make drivers or support the platform.
As i386 is getting old and everything move to 64-bit we need to bring the AMD64 version more up to date. It already runs quite well but there are some problems.
We for sure could need founding.
We have something called power2the people.
https://www.power2people.org/It is a way to try to make stuff done. It worked some times. The problem is that many times the money just got locked there as noone wanted to do the project. That also made people think 2 times before putting money to a project.
What always worked good is if someone put a price to a project. It is kind of like how crowdfounding, kickstarter work.
OS codeing and hardware hacking is be founded in a more general way. The one that does the Pi port have a Patreon site.
https://www.patreon.com/michal_schulzMost that coded for the OS never made any money.
In the past there been someone trying to found development with selling stuff like t-shirts, drinking cups with AROS log etc. It never worked well. It could be possible to do something like that again, but would need marketing.
I have some ideas how AROS could become more successfull. I been involved in the project for over 10 years. Not as a coder but I'm doing the
www.AspireOS.com distribution, founding of a projects, supported many projects, beta testing and more. I have a long history with the Amiga. I know what it is about and learned a lot about what people want from it etc. It is not easy at all. I'm not going into that part cause it is very complicated. You can PM me if you like to talk more about it.