AVD emulator

I've started to play with NPM distributed toolkit for SFDC mobile development.  Most of the quirks have been ironed out in a day, but AVD is still kind of a pain.  I've got HXAM running - it's actually easier to set it up on Windows 7 with no need for the extra patch for Mountain Lion.  So Atom based emulator is pretty snappy, but I still couldn't get the RAM to go beyond 768 MB.  There are a bunch of references out there advising manually editing the config files for AVDs, but none worked for me so far.  Will have to take a good look at Genymotion later I guess.