[after_care]

I'm in this space as a hobbyist, a consumer and occasional producer (I've done some limited runs on simple projects). I'm specifically interested in jp coin-op and 16-bit home console. I see your concern.

There's always going to be the originals, which will almost definitely hold value for the lifetime of millennials at least.

This is always going to be a small market driven by passion. If you can write a PlayStation flash cart you can almost defiantly make something with a higher market value.

There is an active market for extremely high quality products in this space. Look at Analogue (analogue.co) which is building FPGA reference-quality reproductions of classic consoles (NES, SNES, GENSIS, and recently GB/GBC/GBA). These machines play original carts better than original hardware, they are widely critically acclaimed, and the company keeps outputting fantastic machines. Many speed running and other competitive organizations accept plays running on analogue hardware, but not other knock-off consoles.