Yeah definitely -- I think the more ambitious project is not just to save the source code, or even search it, but to save a complete build AND runtime environme

Yeah definitely -- I think the more ambitious project is not just to save the source code, or even search it, but to save a complete build AND runtime environment for the software. Of course, it's underspecified turtles all the way down, but I bet you can bottom out with QEMU, which can be run in a mode where it's mostly ANSI C I believe? (i.e. the slow mode without hardware acceleration) QEMU seems to be the most portable emulator AFAICT.