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What is that one item you want for your collection but probably won't due to cost or other reasons.

My answer is simple, an FM Towns.
X68000 is easy to emulate I have a near complete disc image set, but FM Towns, even before the great romsite purge it was hard to find Roms and ISOs for this thing.
It had super accurate Arcade ports and great arrange soundtracks.

After that would be the more common Neo Geo, MVS or AES doesn't matter, but the price of the system plus games, or even the System + Flash cart limits me to emulating it for eternity.

3rd place is the obvious, All the Shmups for Saturn. I'll never obtain them. I'm limited to Hyper Duel's arcade version in MAME

An RTX 2080 GPU, and a 27" monitor w/ G-Sync and 144hz refresh rate.

I'd be set for a looong while after that.

Somehow netting for cheap a square LCD/LED panel of over 20" (they cost over $1K) to replace a CRT with. Nearly as obscene and more practically had, it would be nice to get aerofighters for snes back but I've accepted it will never happen.

Definitely the gold Dreamcast. Supposedly only five were made.

non-yellow snes

CIB copies of Grand Slam Tennis and Spidrrs for the Arcadia 2001. They are legitimately rare/extremely rare games, and copies only come up for sale about once a decade. Each will also cost hundreds of dollars, which is more than I typically care to pay for second generation games. They’re the only two titles I need to complete my collection, though! (I lucked into a CIB copy of the ultra-rare Red Clash a few years ago.)

Panzer Dragoon Saga and Super Metroid are probably my most coveted games (CIB PAL).

But, is not due to rarity or price, they're almost always up on eBay and the price is within reason (since I tend to spend upwards of $200 for modern limited editions frequently anyway) is mostly due to my priorities and also because neither my Saturn nor my Super Nintendo are RGB ready.

I guess a better choice, both for rarity and price would be the Midnight Blue Playstation 1 console, doesn't show up anywhere often, since I think only 100 of them were made and its pretty expensive when it does. But if I had to pick a game...

Probably the Elemental Gearbolt Assassin Case Edition (with the Gold Memory Card), which wasn't ever really commercially available anyway, and can cost as much as a used car to get these days, is hard to see a time in the near future where I can excuse the expense, that's after tracking one of the 50 that exist down that is...

My holy grail is the source code to a game called VR-1 Crossroads. It was a graphical Mud developed by an online game studio in the late 90s. It featured a graphical UI, music and sound effects, graphical mini games, a sprawling city and more.

There were a ton of factions you could join, each with a hierarchy based on goals that each faction was trying to achieve. While some dedicated time to gather resources to blackmail npc characters, others looked for nodes of power to control that have them access to a dreamworld. The game had open pvp and open looting. It also featured a phone system where you could buy cellphones and use payphones. This was the only way to contact other players from long distances and you had things like caller ID. Players had alias names and could give out their real name... Or even a fake name to be known by to other players. It had a working subway system, player housing, a very formidable stealth and espionage system, a crime system and so much more. It was insane and ahead of its time in ways we have never seen in a modern game today..... And it failed miserably.

The game is lost to the world and no one has heard hide nor hair of its existence. Blog posts sprout up from time to time about how amazing it was, but we have no access to the game in any way.

It is such a shame. It was really something special that did things no other online game has done, let alone any text adventure.

BogusMeatFactory wrote:The game is lost to the world and no one has heard hide nor hair of its existence.

It does seem to be seriously gone. There's still a trailer for it on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5kpcBAIvmc

I agree, sounds like it would have been rad to play.