Repros of official carts bother me because you are paying some dude quite a bit of money for a knock off. I don't quite know how to explain it other than that. Buying second hand copies doesn't benefit the original developer or publisher, but buying repros of official games puts money into the pockets of folks who imo are scum. Same goes to folks who sell repro labels and boxes and try to pass it off as authentic.
Plus, by creating repros of official games, it gives folks who actually are scum the opportunity to attempt to sell the game as official to make money off of the fact that an official goes for so much higher than a repro.
I personally would much rather emulate than by a repro. I'd consider an everdrive, but they are expensive, and generally I find OG controllers suck. All of my NES controllers suck or the controllers suck in general. I find that a Wii classic controller is much more comfortable and responsive than a SNES controller. ETC.
As much as I'm against piracy, I'd rather see folks pirating software before paying good money to a counterfeiter.
Repros of hacked, homebrew, or translated games are completely different.I've been thinking about getting an everdrive for the snes/genesis just because of the prices for those games in general. Especially since they support patched roms for Japanese/European games as well.
I have both of those everdrives. They are indeed fantastic on the original consoles. But the Mega Ever Drive does not work on many clone consoles.
Neither work with the Retron 5.
There is a trick you can do with the Retron5, and I've done it, where using ANY SNES cart, you can patch the game so that you are playing ANY SNES game you want.
I popped in my test cart (a copy of Super Mario World with a damaged casing and no label, that I use to test systems and controllers), patched the ROM, and it loaded up Fire Emblem translated into English.
I believe the method also works for Genesis and NES games.