You'll have to do some investigation but you might be best off with a used high end Android phone. I have a midrange Android phone and it can run Melee but that it's an easier game to emulate.

Please tell us your upper limit for your budget because our definitions of reasonable might differ.

Really good resource, thanks!

If the point of it is indeed a learning project then it makes sense to me. A side note: The free market and competition making products better are both good arguments too but my counter to that would just be that PCSX2 is just so good and mature.

I know its not directly related but I was reading about how little gaming there is on iOS a few days ago and now seeing some psycho making that even worse gave me the lil' nose exhalation you do when something is funny but not that funny.

bsnes/ares, Flycast, Mesen, and I think BigPEmu all have 100% compatibility with all released games. Also Dolphin themselves achieved 100% Gamecube playability a while ago AFAIR. And yeah. It is very impressive.