I know the difference and I know some of the possibilities, but this is about combining the two to to accomplish something. Please keep in mind that this is a COMPLETE hypothetical.
I know that gaming consoles, more specifically the chips, may be emulated however the results are poor. Usually the emulation runs very slow. What I want to know though is, remember hypothetically speaking, would it be possible to take a very high-end computer and put a virtual machines on it which would use the BIOS, etc to emulate a gaming console. The virtual machine would tie in with emulations to make it appear as the original console.
Say taking the highest end i7, or building a 4 processor quad core system with 24+ GB of RAM, etc. I'm not saying anything cost effective.
Think of something along the lines of a PC that could serve as a Multi-Media PC, a multi-channel DVR, gaming rig, ps2, ps3, wii, xbox, xbox 360, etc. I'm just saying various consoles for compatibility. More of less something that you could choose. It would be like booting into Windows and using VMWare or something. Just start up you machine and play whatever you wanted, when you were done you could shut it off. It would expand things a lot. It would also cost a ton to build a computer to do such.
One of my main questions is will it still be slow even on a modern day system? I haven't been able to find any really recent articles. I don't consider 2006 recent as technology moves far too fast. Considering we get to see new processors somewhere between every 3-6 months, 3 years is beyond obsolete.
I'm not trying to offend or upset anyone about the obsolete comment. I still use some older systems for misc whatever. They work good enough for what I do with them, especially if it's just to check e-mail.