I’m focused on NES, SNES, N64, Master System, and Genesis at the moment. I’ve just about reached the end of the cheap NES games and bought an Everdrive N8 Pro earlier this year. Mainly for ROM translations and homebrew, but I will admit to playing some of the higher dollar games on it. I’d much rather play actual carts though.
For me personally, I’ve found that I’ll go upwards of $60+ for a RPG or meatier action adventure game, but haven’t so far spent more than that on any of the consoles.
I’ve also opted to buy ports over original games in some cases. Chrono Trigger for example, I won’t spend $250 on it so I bought the Japanese DS port since it was $30 shipped and supports English out of the box.
I don’t have a hard cut-off but I also haven’t bought a physical game in some years now because of the price increases. I would love to continue my Dreamcast collection but it’s not worth the risk spending so much anymore.
I just sold my Dreamcast for that very reason. Well that and to focus more on Nintendo hardware since it’s what I grew up with. I know optical drive emulators exist, but for whatever reason I don’t like them as much as a flash cart type situation. Says the guy who has two picoboot GameCubes :)
I used to collect a lot more in the last 20 so years but sold anything not Dreamcast related. That was mostly because of space saving though.
I did manage to get a clone GDEMU before they were in high demand but playing roms loses the nostalgic charm that having something physical has.
I did picoboot instead of an ODE specifically so I could still play my admittedly small GameCube collection.