Game cartridge batteries.
 

I don't know how many retro game collectors there are on here, but I like to collect gameboy games and N64 games myself. If the game requires a battery to save, then that battery needs to be replaced at some point. Well I found this guy on ebay named Vinnygames who mods the game with a battery grip that holds the battery and makes them easily replaceable. I tried to solder 2 myself before finding out about this guy and I failed miserably. I bought the cheapest soldering kit on ebay and nothing went right. I sent him 25 of my games and only a couple of my games lost the original save file. So somehow he does this in a way where the save file doesn't delete. I am not trying to advertise or anything. I just wanted others to know about this convenient service.

Or you could do like everyone who isn't a hipster has done since the late 90s and use emulators and save states. You'll never change a battery.

Really, if you think about it, you could resolve this without ROMS, even when using the original cartridges....

With all of the modern, generic retro-consoles out there that they haven't normalized internal saved states on those directly. So it wouldn't matter if your Zelda cartridge battery crapped out using one of those.

I did that for awhile. In fact I still do that for snes and sega genesis games. However, there is something really cool about owning the game to me. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

Nothing is stopping you from owning a game and playing it on emulation.

It looks like Andrew is using "emulation" to describe both "ROMS" and "2nd party hardware". Which I guess is actually accurate, whereas I've only referred to "emulation" when I have a file full of ROMS and some program that will run them.

But yeah, like I mentioned above, you could buy one of the zillions of 3rd party systems out there which can emulate any system from the 8-bit through the 32-bit era and most sill have 3 cartridge slots that will accept NES, SNES and Genesis for your authentic games.

That's right. Last summer I bought a Retron 3 system which plays NES, SNES and Genesis cartridges as if it was the original console. I love it and when my best friend comes over for a week next week, we're going to play it on my OLED TV. The pixels doesn't show up that much on my TV.

But I'm with you Mad Dog McMutt on gaming, because when you have the physical copy, it's yours, but a ROM and emulator, it's a pirated copy.