So! I wanna share something really neat that I found out about recently. Basically, making your own little game console to play retro game emulators! :D
The long and short of it is it’s a Raspberry Pi that runs RetroPie. The former is a fairly cheap single board computer (basically it’s tiny, doesn’t normally come in a case, and can work surprisingly well as a full computer). The latter is a thing you can install on a Raspberry Pi to run emulators!
The only unfortunate thing is that apparently Raspberry Pi isn’t strong enough to properly handle any games/emulators for the 3D consoles (so from N64/Playstation/Saturn and onwards; I imagine anything from the DS onwards will also have the same problems). So you can at least have a nice little retro console for games up to the SNES/Genesis era if you stick with Raspberry Pi.
However! You can also set up RetroPie on a PC, as long as it’s running Ubuntu! So say, if you have a desktop that you’re not using anymore and it has strong enough specs for the 3D game emulators, you can install Ubuntu on there, then set up RetroPie on top of that!
If you’d rather have your emulators on a device dedicated to just that, then there are definitely options for it. Make it yourself, don’t have to buy something prebuilt! :D