“Difficult” is a huge understatement. It’s borderline-impossible. Well, if you’re a multi-billionaire it would be fine, but otherwise it’s impossible. I love going to thrift stores (we call them ‘op shops’ here in oz), garage sales, etc, I do this almost daily. But in a 10+ years period of desperate searching I’ve never even once seen an old-school game in one of those places. A big part was just yeah, many of the games and systems weren’t even released here, and if they were it was in very small numbers. Plus, you have to remember Australia’s population is about one tenth of USA’s, so that increases the scarcity. One time, in a moment of glorious unimaginable serendipity I found a huge box of N64 games sitting on the side of the road down a dusty street in the middle of nowhere. It was absolutely bizarre and surreal. It was almost as though the hand of God/Cthulhu had taken pity and placed it there as I was wandering the dimly-lit cobblestoned alleys of North Melbourne on a moonlit night. That’s the only time I’ve been able to get a good deal (other than spending huge dollars importing stuff from OS).
Perhaps you should! I definitely feel retro PC games are unnoticed and unappreciated these days. There’s one or two youtubers like LGR who look into it, but it’s pretty sparse. There are some games like GODS (1991) or BioMenace (1993) that I hold up with such nostalgiac reverence. For me, when I think of gaming as a kid of think of those games, but most people think of Mario and stuff.
You should do a good deed for the neglected MS-DOS/Amiga/IBM/whatever games and play one of those games using DOSBOX or something. A really good one I would highly recommend would be Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure for DOS, episode 1. It’s a short beautiful little game, my favourite DOS game of all time, you could probably complete it in an hour or two. Plus DOSBOX has really good controller support build-in.
Note also: DosBox is open source freeware, and also Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure episode 1 is still “shareware” so you can actually happily download and play this one guilt-free without breaking any archaic laws or being hunted down by 85 year old Apogee executives! 