FreeMint - XaAES is the most maintained and advanced system available on Atari hardware.
Although I always disliked Intel PC hardware it obviously provides a cheap and powerful system these days.
Getting FreeMint to boot on a pc would be a great step and would make the most use of this valuable project producing a really high performance machine.
I would suggest joining the Mint Mailing list and lurking for a while to see what is happening or read the archives on the FreeMint website. The FreeMint guys are knowledgeable, enthusiastic and helpful but there is a lot of work they would like to do that requires more skilled people to get involved.