http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/89396-University-Developing-Universal-Game-Emulator
That's pretty cool, yeah.

about time, now we just have to burn all consoles and the master race of PC gamers will reign over the gaming industry.
also now they can complain more over piracy on console games, hooray!

I used to think it was a pipe dream. I'm glad I was wrong.

This calls for ............................a Daikatana styled ad!!
"PC gaming is going to make consoles its bitches!"
also:
One machine to rule them all, one machine to find them, one machine to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

Haven't any of you heard of ? It does the exact same thing, except it actually exists already and has reached a playable level of emulation for a growing percentage of the supported systems. It shares code with [url=http://mamedev.org]MAME, so like MAME there are some systems supported that can do little more than boot and display an error message or two (or simply not boot at all), but this is constantly improving.

the important thing to note, isn't necessarily "OMFG it's a Universal Emulator" but more "OMFG a University is doing it."

They won't be allowed to release it though will they? It'd probably cause the first joint venture between sony, nintendo and microsoft in the form of one massive lawsuit

It sounds good, but I'm afraid legal reprecautions will shut this project down.

I doubt they'll ever get to a point of it being needed.

emulating a platform is a lot different from distributing roms. what currently protects emulator makers and distributors was a lawsuit that was against sony saying their video products allowed for piracy and should not be sold.. because they had a record function for television.
sony won the case because, giving the reasoning that an item can be used for an illegal purpose doesn't mean the item itself is illegal (i.e. guns in the united states, cars, knives, etc.. all can be used illegally, but typically don't).
So i don't think anyone could bring any legal action against them unless they were in fact distributing copies of the games without some sort of consent.

Yeah but there's still the system ROMs that come from the chips on the actual hardware. I seem to recall amiga & PS1 emulators being threatened with action for distributing kickstart roms and whatver the PS1 analogue was.

Well, I'm not really certain they're applying the universal editor to all periods, the article said specifically that it was dealing with hardware from the 70's.

Modern emulators do not include BIOS files. Some emulators don't need a BIOS (e.g. for the NES and other comparatively simple systems), but for those that do it's up to you to track them down just like the ROMs themselves.

Aye. They just have to basically say that the museum (ha) needs to contact Sega or whoever made the system to get a bios. No big deal.
That being said: This seems kind of pointless. MAME is already working on the arcade machines of the era, and the rest can be handled with a simple front-end. Pretty much every emulator worth using is freeware (and many are even open source). So just code a piss-poor frontend that will load the appropriate emulator with the desired rom (most of the ones I tried support command line parameters already...), and you are done.

Bof, what a waste of time.... they could simply give the money to developers of the mighty Dosbox, ZSNES, ScummVM, Gens, MESS, MAME, Model 2 Emulator and so on and they could have the job done just now. Or just engage them into the matter.
This is a short-sighted approach to something that has already had the time to develop and flourish within on-line communities.
A waste of time, and a waste of money, imho.