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One emulator to rule them all...

No, emulators don't cut it.

I respectfully disagree... there is one emulator to rule them all

Old ZX 80 hardware is expensive and rare from what I have seen. You can use the MESS Sinclair ZX 80 target to relive those 8-bit days of yore without the fear of electrical or mechanical breakdowns associated with running on the actual hardware. A lot of early microcomputer equipment often had power supply or other problems which means that even if you can get your hands on the real hardware now, and it works, it may not run for long before things start breaking. I do not have any old ZX 80's and don't have a ROM so I'm not sure of the exact legality were I to acquire one from say Mega Upload or such, but I almost suspect that they might be drifting close to the abandonware status in some areas at least.

There are quite a lot of neat old systems that MESS can emulate. I've been trying to get NitrOS-9 working with a Motorola 6309 myself.

MESS has preliminary support for emulating the DECTalk.

MESS http://www.mess.org/ already has a PDP-1 emulator, it's currently in C.

A 'general emulator' is called MESS (Multi Emulator Super System) http://www.mess.org/ you can play computers, consoles, and calculators, some work very well and other don't work right now. MESS supports 479 unique systems with 1,282 total system variations.

I'm more interested in having it emulated in MESS.

There is already a team of highly skilled developers being very busy at this exact same task. And there's another team of highly skilled developers being very busy at making all torts of computers work on that platform.

It's more like Mame and MESS together.

Well, to some extent. Check MESS.

mess is just that for home systems (consoles and computers), while mame is for the arcade machines... so where are the news except that someone just decided to invent the wheel once again?

btw mess and mame are excpetionally well documented... http://mess.org/ for those too lazy to google it up

A good start is to get a Catweasel floppy controller. If you connect a 3", a 3.5", a 5.25" and a 8" floppy drive to it you will be able to read almost any floppy disk there is, including C64, Amiga, CP/M, CPC, Mac, Apple II, Famicom and so on.

Then comes the bigger problem: Finding the tools to extract files from their filesystems. There are small extraction/conversion tools on the net for almost every format there is, collecting dust on long forgotten areas of FTP servers. Some of them require some slight modifications to compile on post-80s UNIX and some only run in MSDOS with full hardware access, but with some patience, DOSBox, Google and imgtool from MESS you should be able to work with most of them.

Then finally comes the biggest problem: Finding applications that can work with the actual files...

It seems a shame not to mention MESS:

http://www.mess.org/

I haven't um, messed with it in quite a while, but they are documenting dozens of architectures and systems(they just happen to be writing the documentation as working code), and when I did last take a look, they were generally making things better all the time.

Not trolling, but I think MAME and MESS are the best gaming platform via emulation :-)

http://mamedev.org/

http://mess.org/

Or, they could make an actual 3D museum, sort of like google earth, only inside. Now THAT would be awesome.

With emulations of the machines at each display point. Not too difficult to do these days. Use this, or maybe something like this.

It's MESS you're thinking of, not MAME.

Mess It's Mame plus all the consoles you'd ever care to emulate, all in one.

Now all you have to do is find your ROMs that you, ummm, misplaced, online, as a torrent file.
Joseph Elwell.

...anyone care to enhance MESS?

Can't believe that noone has mentioned the MESS project http://mess.org/.

Yes, its primary goal is to emulate all of the home computers, but a lot of the systems it covers were used in businesses as well.

If you really want to emulate a gazillion OSes,

see:

MESS.org

It's based on MAME's CPU and hardware emulation and codebase.

MESS Currently emulates 294 systems (alright 60 are marked as not-working...)

Don't see your favorite system emulated? Help out!

If you were sane, you'd have archived all those floppies on a cd-rom. It's disquieting how many boxes fit on a single cd :)

BTW, there exist many free PC emalutors:

• Dosbox is by far the best. It's a true emulator, portable, has a built in DOS, and is trivial to setup (no config files, uses the file system instead of disk images). Only major problem is the lack of protected mode support (if you also want to play some more recent games :)
• DOSEMU is also pretty good, and it will run most games, but it's configuration file is a mess, and it requires Linux/i386 (they were working on a CPU emulator, so it might work on other platforms by now).
• Bochs is another true emulator, not targeted specifically to games as Dosbox is. As a result, it is slower and more cumbersome to setup, but it supports protected mode games. Bochs is your only hope if you want to play protected mode games on most non-intel platforms.
• MESS, the console and home computer counterpart of MAME, has an IBM PC and PC/XT emulator. They probably go for hardware emulation accuracy. I've never used it.
• Flopper is a tool that lets you run games that were distributed as bootable floppies. I have no such games, so I've never used it :)

Quick, somebody write a MESS driver for this!

In case anyone wants to experience the Fairchild Channel F on their computer, it has been emulated as part of MESS. I know because I worked on that code. :)

That's really a job for MESS, MAME's emulate-everything-that's-not-an-arcade-machine sibling. Wait, maybe MAME should do it. Crap, a console that takes quarters? Damnit, now I'm confused.

mess supports kaypro emulation - kaypro was a CP/M machine.

for this triumph, i want all your copies of micro cornucopia and foglight!

Ahh, the TI-99/4a... What a great system... I had one of those and had countless hours playing car wars, hunt the wumpus and of course parsec... MESS will emulate the TI-99/4A, and you can find ROMS here