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Retrode is discontinued

https://www.dragonbox.de/en/63... disagrees with you. And there are others for copying/using NES-cartridges, like e.g. http://www.retrousb.com/produc...

Retrode is discontinued and never supported NES anyway.

My oldest has a hexacore with 8Gb of RAM and a TB HDD and it only cost $350 shipped

Or $1,400 plus monitors plus OS plus furniture for four players.

you have a system that will play console games going back to the Atari 2600

Good luck dumping your authentic game cartridges to create the ROM files you need to play your console games. Last time I checked, Retrode was discontinued indefinitely.

and of course web, video, hell you can even get your work done on it

As for work or other non-gaming uses of a PC, console gaming families are apparently happy with just taking turns on the family PC, possibly adding a tablet or low-end laptop to the mix.

Had a friend that wanted to get into PC gaming but money was tight, found him a nice C2Q system [on a classified ad website] with 19 LCD and KM for just $130

I know some people who are afraid of buying things through classified advertising, given news reports of pickup encounters that have turned violent. And how much for furniture? A console uses your existing living room TV, while each gaming PC generally needs its own dedicated desk.

The Retrode is a brilliant little gadget: http://www.retrode.com/

It's basically an old-school console cartridge -> USB adaptor. It also supports old Megadrive / SNES gamepads and doesn't require host software (which is actually rather neat - it'll appear as a USB mass storage device with a cartridge image on it, plus presenting the controllers as either gamepads or keyboards). With further adapters you can plug in Mastersystem, Gameboy and N64 carts (plus two N64 controllers).

It's just a really nice piece of work. I use it to rip my cartridges, just like I rip CDs, then put them into whatever emulator I like. Avoids the legally dubious websites, etc. I can imagine there might be grey areas in some emulation stuff still (e.g. some emulators need a BIOS image, which someone has to have dumped from the console) but that's only for certain consoles - and at least you don't have to go on dodgy websites to download the games you already own.

as the homebrew guys get a better handle on a system it doesn't take them long to create a good working emulator.

But they don't always bother to add a good 10-foot-capable front-end.

Oh and unlike your Sony and Nintendo products thanks to emulators you can play every game from the NES-Wii on the Nintendo side and PS1-PS2 on the Sony side

Good luck emulating an Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, Xbox One, or PlayStation 4 game on a PC. Among games for systems that can be emulated, their graphics are widely perceived to be inferior to current console games, and sport games lack updated rosters.

so you don't have to worry about losing your old games just because you got a new system

Good luck dumping cartridges to a PC. As a PC builder, if you advertise that a machine is useful for playing ROMs downloaded from the Internet, you induce infringement. See MGM v. Grokster and foreign counterparts. Commercial cart dumpers, such as Retrode and Kazzo/INL-Retro, are believed legal to own in many jurisdictions but may prove hard to get and/or hard to get working.

If it has a way to play the old NES and SNES roms, it may be kind of fun

Every Ouya console can be converted to the devkit. I imagine that one can sideload an Android NES or Super NES emulator. But the reason these emulators probably won't find their way into the Ouya Store is the same reason that Fedora doesn't include emulators: the company doesn't want to incur secondary liability by "inducing" copyright infringement (MGM v. Grokster). One can make probably-noninfringing (under US law, 17 USC 117(a)) copies of a Sega Genesis or Super NES cartridge by buying a Retrode cart reader, and adapters for Nintendo 64, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and Sega Master System cartridges are coming soon. But how would one do so for NES games? The most widely used NES dumping device, the CopyNES, has to be soldered into an authentic NES console, and I imagine that most users aren't willing to do that.

there's nothing stopping you from hooking up four USB gamepads to a USB hub, loading up ZSNES, and getting some four player Turtles in Time action going on.

1. Turtles in Time for Super NES came out before the multitap, as basscomm pointed out. 2. Super NES cartridges don't fit in a PC without an obscure German adapter sold only online.

And that's not to mention all of the games you can play exclusive to the PC that are fun in their own right

Do you know of a list of worthwhile PC-native games supporting two to four gamepads?

Emulators.

Now that Retrode is sold out, how would you recommend making ROM files from one's cartridges?