Need Console 101 badly

Okay, I've thoroughly confused myself. Remember, now, I'm old and feeble
and slow to learn, as many will tell you. Also, my brains hurt from playing
with AJAX and EGL all weekend. But I digress...

I'm a twinax console junkie. I've been using them forever, I still have
twinax bricks on both my model 270 and my 520. The 270 is about to get its
(hopefully) last upgrade, but that will be disks and then an update to V5R4.
After that, it's time to let it slide gracefully into semi-retirement,
running the websites and doing back compiles to V5R2. The twinax console
will become a dedicated piece of hardware just for that machine (it ain't
broke, so I ain't gonna fix it).

The reason it will be dedicate to the 270, though is because the model 520
is going to be replaced soon, probably with a 515. And in so doing, it's
time to make my first foray into a twinax-less future. The problem is that,
as I pointed out in the beginning, I've thoroughly confused myself.

It's the whole HMC thing that has me confused. It seems that many people
love the HMC, but from what I gather it's a dedicated PC that you get from
IBM that costs an arm and maybe half a leg. The HMC lets you get in
remotely and do everything but butter the muffin in the morning, and it's
fantastic for people with multiple machines or even multiple partitions on a
single machine. However, it seems like overkill (not to mention expensive)
for someone like me with effectively a single development machine. In my
case maybe a twinax brick still isn't such a bad alternative.

But occasionally I catch a glimpse of a third, intermediate option. It
seems to me that there is a console that is not HMC, but is not twinax
either. It's not the infamous thick client Ops Console, but instead it's a
direct-connect Ethernet console that uses a special Ethernet port on your
System i and that you can get to using a browser... and best of all, it's
part of the base OS. Is this a real thing? Or am I imagining it? Can I
use any old PC to access it? And thus, can I use VNC to access that PC and
thus remotely access my console?

Could it be that simple?

Or do I have to stop using dry-erase markers in an enclosed space?

Seriously, a little bit of console 101 would be ever so gratefully received.

Joe