+1 for no.
As someone who's been actively buying old consoles for my collection recently, they've sprung waaaaay up in price ever since Nintendo got the idea of selling their "classic" consoles. Once they decided to harden the nostalgia boners of old people and hipster kids, the actual consoles themselves started shooting way up in price when people realized there's a bigger market than they thought for the stuff.
For example, a few years ago I could've (and did, actually) bought a nice condition SNES with two controllers and 5 or 6 decent games (aka not sports shovelware) for like $50 total. Nowadays, just a decent looking SNES alone is going to cost you that, not counting extra controllers or games, which are both quite expensive as well these days. Cheaper ones exist, but they're usually super yellowed and disgusting looking so it's gonna need a nice Retrobright run before it'll look nice again.
On an unrelated note, I feel goddamn old with your implication that the OG XBOX is a "retro" system
. But it might be a good place to start though, because those are still incredibly cheap these days and as you mentioned, have tons of emulators and such for them and is very easily soft modded. The Wii is another console that has a ton of emulators, is incredibly cheap, and is easily soft modded, so you could also grab one of those if you're not totally intent on playing on actual hardware.
