RetroGaming

I found myself thinking similar recently. My gaming time is limited, and when I fancy playing something it’s easier to open an emulator, and flash carts etc anlso add a lot of moderns conveniences to playing on real hardware also. I had a whole shelf of boxed Nintendo games that I rarely if ever played because I didn’t want to damage the increasingly fragile boxes.

I downsized my collection to a few favourite systems and it’s turned out for the better. The money raised from the bits I sold has been well spent of other interests/projects, and the things I’ve kept I’m getting more enjoyment out of.

For me, I still have all my gaming stuff, but I purchased cartridge dumpers and made game (and some save) backups of nearly all my cartridge based games so I could have them on my Raspberry Pi and Steam Deck - Atari 2600, NES, Super NES, N64, Game Boy, etc. To be honest, while I do own the original hardware and game copies, I still prefer to play my dumps on emulators because of things like save states, rewind, HD resolution on legacy polygonal systems, cheat codes, better controls (Kaboom! (Atari 2600) is more responsive on Steam Deck via RetroArch than it is on original hardware on an HDTV), and overall convenience, such as portability for the Steam Deck, or a front end that allows me to easily pick a game on my Raspberry Pi.

Of course, there are some instances where I may still need to resort to original hardware, like afaik the only way to play WarioWare: Twisted (GBA) without using a control patch is either on an original GBA using an original Game Pak, or by using the VBA GX homebrew emulator for the Wii (which desyncs and drifts very quickly). There are also some games with unusual controls or features that are very tricky to map correctly on an emulator, such as the majority of the Wii and Wii U library, any PS2 game that took advantage of the pressure buttons, the unholy 3rd gen keypad controller Trinity (ColecoVision, Intellivision, and Atari 5200), games with extensive use of a microphone or a proprietary controller (Hey You, Pikachu! (N64), Caution! Seaman (Dreamcast), some DS games, etc.), just to name a few. There's also some systems that may never get dumped or have an emulator made, such as the VTech and LeapFrog learning systems.

I could go on, but I've made by point, I emulate whenever possible, but I still make an effort to obtain my games legitimately so I can dump them and emulate them