The way companies try and upsell retro games rarely ever wins me over, so I just stick to emulation 99% of the time. I’m a technical user and I have no qualms with pirating unrealistically priced or hard to access content, so the barrier of entry is basically zero to me. The only collections and such that catch my eye are the ones with additional QoL features, good supplementary material, stuff like that. I don’t even mean basic features like filters, scaling options, save states or rewinding, RetroArch probably does it better anyway, I mean things I wouldn’t be able to get otherwise like added difficulty settings or expanded content.

The perfect examples of what I’m looking for are things like Atari 50 and The Making of Karateka. Unrealistic to expect of most, granted, but the gold standard as far as I’m concerned. A good, more vanilla example is the Mega Man Battle Network collections, since they have proper online play and content that was previously Japan only.