Though far from the level of difficulty presented by jacquesm, the same thing happened to me with an end-of-term project a few years back.
We had to make a small piece of software in Java. Most of my mates were going for boring stuff, such as sudoku solvers or small neural networks to play the likes of Connect four.
I wanted to make a Gameboy emulator.
"You can't do this", said my professor. "At least not in two weeks' time."
Well I don't remember much besides coding during those two weeks, but guess what - after 14 days, my program could boot Tetris. No sound, granted, but it was playable.
My professor was quite the sore loser though - he considered the program incomplete since it only booted a few roms, didn't have sound and could crash randomly. I ended up turning in a gameboy rom dissassembler instead, complete with GUI and breakpoints setting.
Still, never believe that "you can't do that".