Now before I even get into my idea, let me just say first that I have no programming knowledge whatsoever and thus have no ability to actually make this, but rather, the point of this thread is to maybe inspire someone who CAN make such a thing to want to do it, assuming it's possible in the first place.
My idea is to create a plugin and accompanying program that would load an Achievements list when running a ROM in an emulator. The Achievements themselves would be dictated by a small group of people (the programmers of the program and perhaps a few others chosen by them) and would cover both simple Achievements (such as "Beat the game" or "Complete (x) Sidequest") and expert level Achievements (such as "Beat the game without dying" or "Reach 100% Completion").
At first, it would most likely be compatible with a small handful of older, but popular games (Mario, Sonic, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, etc), but it would hopefully eventually be compatible with games up to the PS1/N64 era (as anything later is somewhat difficult to emulate on many PCs), with every major, popular game having it's own Achievement list.
Naturally, there would be a "Gamerscore" that you could compare with other people, and online leaderboards. And of course, if you activate the Emulator's Cheats function, the program will auto detect it and you won't be able to earn any Achievements while they're enabled.
However, the problem is figuring out how to make the program recognize that you have completed an Achievement. Like I said, I have no programming knowledge so I'm not entirely sure how such a thing would work, but from what I can imagine, having Achievements like "Beat the game" and "Beat (x) sidequest" would be easy, only requiring the plugin to check if a "switch" has been triggered, so to speak, but things like "Beat the game without dying" or "Use every special move with every character (in a fighting game)" would be more difficult for it to notice...
My idea is to create a plugin and accompanying program that would load an Achievements list when running a ROM in an emulator. The Achievements themselves would be dictated by a small group of people (the programmers of the program and perhaps a few others chosen by them) and would cover both simple Achievements (such as "Beat the game" or "Complete (x) Sidequest") and expert level Achievements (such as "Beat the game without dying" or "Reach 100% Completion").
At first, it would most likely be compatible with a small handful of older, but popular games (Mario, Sonic, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, etc), but it would hopefully eventually be compatible with games up to the PS1/N64 era (as anything later is somewhat difficult to emulate on many PCs), with every major, popular game having it's own Achievement list.
Naturally, there would be a "Gamerscore" that you could compare with other people, and online leaderboards. And of course, if you activate the Emulator's Cheats function, the program will auto detect it and you won't be able to earn any Achievements while they're enabled.
However, the problem is figuring out how to make the program recognize that you have completed an Achievement. Like I said, I have no programming knowledge so I'm not entirely sure how such a thing would work, but from what I can imagine, having Achievements like "Beat the game" and "Beat (x) sidequest" would be easy, only requiring the plugin to check if a "switch" has been triggered, so to speak, but things like "Beat the game without dying" or "Use every special move with every character (in a fighting game)" would be more difficult for it to notice...