Game Preservation at UK University

At Portsmouth University in the UK, some people are working on a way to preserve various types of digital data, including video games. They're approaching it from the stand point of games being a part of "cultural history." Part of their work includes the development of a new emulator that they claim will be able to open every digital file ever created, including all video games.

What are your thoughts on this? To me, it sounds like a massive undertaking. One that the current gaming companies might not welcome, since it would cut into their profits even more than existing emulation already does. Being based at a university could give this project more legitimacy than other emulators and might cause new headaches for the companies.

It's a monumental undertaking no doubt. The ROM based systems will be easy to emulate, but the cd and DVD based systems will pose some major issues. I've done some emulation in my life, and the only games that have really been solid in emulation are the ROM based games. Some cd based emulators work well if you have the original disk, but cd emulators that use ISOs are not all that great.