Shut up! SHUT UP! SHUT UUUUUP!!! :matt-jokerfied:
Just get a fucking rom!!! Go to Google and you can have the game on your hard drive in 5 minutes! Chances are your "incredibly rare" cult classic is playable with a high degree of accuracy. Even if you dislike emulation, you can just burn a disc, put the game on internal storage or use an Evercart depending on the system.
We don't have to pretend we need to hunt down decades-old pieces plastic to access old video games. What's that? Kuon for PS2 is really rare and expensive? Well I'm going to go download it right now to spite your collector brainworms... AND IT WILL BE 100% FREE OF CHARGE
I once caved and bought an original SNES copy of Earthbound for $500 on ebay and that's the only extravagant physical purchase of a game I've ever made. This was back when Nintendo was really weird about Earthbound, probably because of the unlicensed music samples in the soundtrack, so I admit I got worried over nothing. This was like in 2008.
Otherwise yeah, just emulate. Emulators are really good now for most things. Sega Saturn games still run a little wonky, and 3DO emulation isn't much better.
The real tragedy is the original Xbox. Emulation is still really awful for it, meaning a lot of its exclusives are gonna sit in obscurity forever. Games like Blinx, Breakdown, the Conker remake, Toejam and Earl 3, and even Dead or Alive 3. They're just kind of gone until original Xbox emulation catches up, and that scene is a lot smaller than teams working on stuff like PS2 and Wii U.
Oh, and Steel Battalion. I never got to play it but damn do I want those controllers. They're incredible :niko-wonderous: