I collect and play a lot of old games (PS1, N64, Gameboy, and Ps2 are the main ones I buy for), but the prices on retro games are rising rapidly. Many games have doubled or tripled in price since around 2020. I like to play PS1 RPGs, but a lot of them are worth way more then I'm willing to spend nowadays. I usually prefer original hardware over emulating, but I've just been priced out of most systems (PS2 is about the only one that I care about where the price is still afforable, but even that is way up). Do you guys think this is a bubble that will pop, or are these insane prices here to stay?
(P.S. if you don't belive me look up any major game on pricecharting.com and look how the prices have spiked since 2020)
I'm assuming you care about simply playing the games instead of having collector-grade copies of the games.
For the PS2, if you have a fat PS2 you can throw a hard drive in it and play games off that. The entire catalog of every PS2 game ever made is on archive.org. It is about 5TB. All the software to do this is free; all you need is a hard drive and either an original network adapter + an IDE to SATA adapter (since they don't make IDE drives anymore) or one of the third-party knockoff adapters that support SATA natively.
For the PS1 and Dreamcast (maybe others but there are the ones I know about) there are hardware mods for the PS1 that let an SD card emulate the CD drive. I have never used one but am strongly tempted to get the Dreamcast one.
For the N64 and other cartridge systems look up the Everdrive. They emulate the cartridge, cost about $200, and let you play ROMs loaded onto an SD card. Game saves write to the SD card, and the cart has a UI to select which game you want to play when you power the system on. I have one for the N64 and it works great. I found a collection of every N64 game ever made (in all regions) on archive.org and threw it on either a 32 or 64 GB SD card.
Yes these things are expensive (except the PS2 mod), but as you note so are the games. You (eg.) spend $200 and you have every N64 game ever made and can also play homebrew games and the odd demo ROM for commercial games that never got released. If a game is $50, it's worth it if there are more than 4 games you want that you don't have.
I have already resorted to an everdrive for n64, GB, and GBA (Even ignoring just regular roms, there are a lot of good rom hacks to play too).
It's nice for games above what I'm willing to spend, but something about owning the actual carts makes it a more fun experience. Usually if I can find the original game for 30 dollars or less (Something increasingly hard to do these days), I usually still buy an original cart.
Fair enough. I'm the opposite in that I use the everdrive even for games I own.
For me it's only fun if it's a cart I had as a kid with ghosts from when I was a kid I can play against. But if I could pull the data off the cart and throw it on the everdrive I would.
They also make USB adapters for controllers and reproduction controllers that are already USB for use on your PC.