> What worries me is if future generations will be able to enjoy the games of today. Will it ever be feasible to emulate a PS3 to the level demanded here? Will my grandchildren in 50 years be able to play GTA 6 on a PS4 emulator? Processing power does not appear to scale to allow this, and there will barely by any of today's consoles still alive by then (also, I doubt 2060s television sets will have HDMI input).

My response would be the trend towards more PC-like architectures (more traditional x86 systems vs something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)) and the fact it's already easy to build a similarly priced ($400-$500) PC with superior performance already (historically rare at release than the new set of consoles) may mean it's easier to accurately run these games in future than a Nintendo 64 or SNES. On the other hand, the original Xbox (circa 2000) was a traditional x86 system running an only slightly modified Windows with DirectX that as far as I know isn't emulated well.

I think the search for accuracy will probably be achieved in the coming decades by producing accurate and cheap clone hardware "dongles" to offload processing and interfacing them to a computer via some future fast bus.