Steam - hypothetical bankruptcy discussion - split from FAQ

[isndl]

Are we certain of this? If we take a look at console emulation, despite what must be a huge pressure to create emulators, the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox generation emulation is partial, spotty and buggy. These are difficult and complex machines to emulate despite being nearly ten years old themselves. In ten years time will winXP emulation be as easy as dos emulation now?

Part of the challenge in console emulation is that you have to emulate both the hardware and the software the console uses. Consoles have very specialized hardware architecture and custom-built software to on top of that, and games built to those exacting specifications aren't likely to be fault-tolerant.

Emulating the Windows operating system on the other hand is very easy and has been done for quite a long time; they're called Virtual Machines, and already used to sandbox nearly any existing operating system you can think of. The hard part would be finding a copy of something like Windows 95 to use, otherwise everything else is quite simple. In fact, Microsoft appears to offer Windows XP emulation free for any Windows 7 user: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/default.aspx