Wow, gross people?! Is collecting that perverse of an activity? OK, yes it is, but so is playing video games in general and enjoying retro games "correctly" in particular. Emulation is a "blessing"! Weird and vaguely competitive.
If someone is excited about sharing something that's completing some part of their collection I think everyone is totally fine with that, it's something they're passionate about!
If it's "I found this thing for cheap and I'm going to charge someone hundreds of dollars because they have no other choice," then do it in something other than a hobby space; don't brag about that. Bragging about scalping makes you an asshole.
Emulation enables hobbyists to play games they otherwise can't find -- or much more commonly, can't afford.
Really, every one of these occupations is gross. Even gaming "ideally" as the poor sap relegated to emulation does is a perversion. And let's not forget those digital collectors. Who reading this thread doesn't have an organized stash of ROM files on their external drive?
Back to the scalper: what actually separates him from the collector? That he fetishizes the money form over the commodity form? In objective terms, the money form really is the purer and cleaner one; it's the commodity form that is marred and gross. Although:
> Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes suddenly and immediately transformed, from its merely ideal shape of money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are money. But now the cry is everywhere: money alone is a commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth.
But none of this matters if you want to stay constrained to some narrow set of nerdy interests. After all is said and done, don't let me "yuck your yum"! So yummy, that corroding PCB smell, those shallow vertical bevels in the gray plastic, that soft crackle of the compressed music of the Nintendo 64... who am I to take that from you? I am no "scalper"!