Clone hardware is becoming more popular. There have been Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis / Megadrive cloned consoles for decades, but recently there's been products like the Hyperkin Ultra Retron (which uses emulation), innumerable Gameboy clones (usually using emulation), but most interestingly also FPGA and ASIC based solutions.
Checkout the MiSTer [1] [2] an FPGA-based system where the community are trying to create faithful reproductions to the original hardware in Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) like Verilog. This FPGA based approach is NOT emulation in software, but reproduction of the electrical logic of actual silicon like the CPU and DSP chips.
I'll mention flashcards exist, and so do reproduction cartridges (could be called "bootlegs" but the original cartridges are no longer manufactured so if advertised clearly nobody has much issue with reproductions).
That's not even getting into the world of Android-based emulation (and the myriad of phone holders + custom controller type products).
In some ways the future of video game preservation is bright (but in other ways we're still settling for good enough instead of perfect reproduction)
And stuff like the SA-1 port of Gradius 3. Fixing the crippling slowdown of the original SNES version by using an enhancement chip from later SNES games.
Checkout the MiSTer [1] [2] an FPGA-based system where the community are trying to create faithful reproductions to the original hardware in Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) like Verilog. This FPGA based approach is NOT emulation in software, but reproduction of the electrical logic of actual silicon like the CPU and DSP chips.
I'll mention flashcards exist, and so do reproduction cartridges (could be called "bootlegs" but the original cartridges are no longer manufactured so if advertised clearly nobody has much issue with reproductions).
That's not even getting into the world of Android-based emulation (and the myriad of phone holders + custom controller type products).
In some ways the future of video game preservation is bright (but in other ways we're still settling for good enough instead of perfect reproduction)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5yPbzD-W-I
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dibLXWdX5-M