Not sure how close this it to what you mentioned but the guts of most emulators.. ie. steem, MAME etc etc... are software CPU cores.
For example the OSIS project has a software emulated 68k CPU so that OAESIS and the other components can run on non 68k systems. BTW. Using the framebuffer as well is a fine idea :) 68k linux bases of course don't require it to be installed.
Also the next big advancement in PC Windows may be its migration to Itanium native code... there may be blood on the floor that day as Intel really will have discarded the x86 platform much like Windows has discarded dos for the NT core. It should indicate how fine the native Itanium core is *if* it can be used to translate an Alpha binary on the fly. Alpha's are not slow and have been performance king pin for some years. Just go to the SETI@home stats and have a look at their crunch times. After all Alpha's themselves have been shipped with x86 emulators that really did a great job. Also I've not seen how Itanium will scale *but* Intel have anounced that the 32bit P4 line will continue for consumers and will scale to 10GHz by 2005. My Thunderbird 1.4GHz CPU sucks around 100Watts.... so... 10GHz power drawage?.. hmmm... either we'll be cooking food in our PC's soon or they'll be coming with water tap connections.
