Very valid questions. There are a lot of collectors out there with working games, but non-working systems. I would say they’re half of the target audience.

The other half of the audience seems to be the people who will buy it and hope that a jailbreak comes out allowing the loading of ROMs from external media. That’s been common on this company’s products for a while, though as I’ve never owned anything from them, I can’t say it’s always happened.

I have a MiSTer FPGA computer, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying PCE/TG16/CD/SG for a while in it now, but of course I don’t care about loading games from original media.

First, I think products like this are mainly geared towards the hardcore audience who already owns a lot of these physical games. A lot of those people are already spending a lot of money on things like mods, upscalers and CRTs, making HD-ready systems like this relatively reasonable price-wise. Retro gaming can be an expensive hobby if you start going down the rabbit hole of owning a bunch of real carts and physical gear to make them play as nicely as possible.

Second, and granted this is a bit iffy, a lot of these Analogue devices have un/official “jailbreak” patches that expand the possibility beyond just physical carts. (They don’t really advertise this a lot, presumably for legal reasons…? I’m not totally sure.)

I have their FPGA SNES, the SuperNT, and I use it to play both the physical carts that I own as well as my collection of SNES roms via the jailbreak firmware. I also have an FPGA NES called the RetroUSB AVS that I have equipped with an everdrive. In both cases I did the math and found that buying these systems is still a more affordable alternative to getting into things like RGB modding authentic hardware and buying a HD upscaler to play on a modern TV.

Without a doubt, the best bang for buck in the FPGA realm is the MiSTer, which of course is still much more expensive than software emulation.