There are many ways to enclose a computer and the support equipment, anything that can enclose a box 10"x6"x8.5" for the N8VEM backplane. A good choice would be a 4u server case. They are more than spacious enough, either come with power supplies or standardized mounting and are fungible. No one is going to cry if you drill holes in a new server case. Another good choice would be a standardized equipment case. There is a larger variety in size and if you aren't using an ATX power supply you aren't losing much vs a server case. I'm going with a third option, laser cut acrylic. My basic design will be acrylic over an aluminum. This is a trade off of expense for modularity.
The beauty of the S100 bus is that it is customizable in ways that modern computers can't be. CPUs, front panels, IO, video among others. Given I have no idea where I am taking the machine once built, flexibility is desirable. Acrylic is a flexible material to work with, laser cutting also is available for a variety of plastics, metals, wood, fabric and paper.
I could make a case with a handful of gussets on the edges and corners; I'm choosing to use beams for esthetic reasons. Aluminum beams are used in robot projects, 3d printers and other open source hardware projects. There are a plethora of suppliers of small aluminum parts, I am going with goBILDA and ServoCity because the 8mm pattern is easy to work with and ServoCity provides STEP files with all of their parts. This makes it easy to layout components, create cut templates and generate a Bill Of Materials (BOM) of the needed parts. The picture above is my chassis in an intermediate "proof of concept" state with my mini-ITX power supply mounted. As it stands, the chassis is extremely rigid and is amazingly light.
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