Loving this thread, just reading through has made me want to start collecting old consoles again, picked up a PS1 with Resident evil 1 and 2 for 11.50 inc. p&p.
Looking to track down a snes at the moment, is it worth going for an NTSC version as opposed to the pal version ? both seem freely available on the bay.
Go for NTSC. It's easier to mod to play PAL games than a PAL console is to play NTSC. If you weren't planning on doing this in the first place, I'd recommend you do as it's reletively simple.