As a lurking, I have to agree with the WinUAE concenses, it's the best so far. I tried the Linux based solutions and they are a lot of work to get running and are still too limited on what can be done with them (not to mention unstable). I have Amithlon, but due to the dispute between the developers and insuing law suits... it's dead. Doesn't work on most of the hardware combinations out there and it certinaly doesn't work that well on my laptop. For that matter WinUAE 2.8.27 runs dog slow on my 64bit laptop too, but it smokes on my Athlon 2100+ desktop. Ofcourse I asked for trouble buying an e-machine laptop I guess . Anyway, booting from the CD only is not the answer, it needs to run on top of some OS, as has already been said many times.
Regards