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
it's cool to like games as objects, it gets weird when it's no longer about the games themselves but amassing big piles of things. you seem normal though, don't worry. I also like popping cartridges into a machine and seeing LEDs blink as part of the experience. I've built my own controllers and revived consoles from the dead before.
there's a type of thankfully rare person who will look down on emulation as inauthentic and will instead pay $1000 for an original CD before just pirating an iso image. At that point it's just weird, you know?