Now there's a challenge.
I wonder if it's possible.
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When Microsoft abandoned its DOS to create a true 32-bit
operating system (NT) they put the Intel '386 chip into
emulation. This is a tried and true path for keeping
dead hardware among the living. Certainly the 6502 in
that Commodore 64 that once ran Jaron's 1982 game program
could be coded up for emulation in contemporary computers,
although I think Jaron's problem was a little more esoteric
than the generic micro.
This is not to say that the problem has been solved in the
larger scenario of a random discoverer finding a document
without a surrounding context of codes that can be translated.
Obviously, if you imagine the worst case scenario where no
"Rosetta Stone" exists, you have to ask what is self-evident.
The SETI folk put a lot of faith in primary numbers. They
look for transmissions around "the water hole." There are
a lot of assumptions you can experiment with to universalize
the encoding.
What I am saying, Stewart, is that the challenge is not
so much encoding the mechanism of playback as it is
in specifying the code's symbolic structure. We found that
phonemes were very useful with hieroglyphs, but it's time
for a more generalized solution.