UK University Making Universal Game Emulator

Techradar reports that researchers at the University of Portsmouth in England are working on a project to create a game emulator that will "recognise and play all types of videogames and computer files from the 1970s through to the present day." One of the major goals of the project is to preserve software from early in the computer age. David Anderson of the Humanities Computing Group said, "Early hardware, like games consoles and computers, are already found in museums. But if you can't show visitors what they did, by playing the software on them, it would be much the same as putting musical instruments on display but throwing away all the music. ... Games particularly tend not to be archived because they are seen as disposable, pulp cultural artefacts, but they represent a really important part of our recent cultural history. Games are one of the biggest media formats on the planet and we must preserve them for future generations."

Comments

Already done

[Stormwatch]

Well, to some extent. Check MESS.

Isn't this MAME (the Mutli-Arcade Machine Emulato?

[nurbles]

Why would anyone bother to do all that again rather than just enhance/improve/contribute to the existing project, which already does an amazing amount of running old computer games?