I have had my Super NES for 10 years or so. Before then, it belonged to my cousins. Despite its long life, it is still in good condition. However, some of the games (about half of my total number of SNES games) do not work any longer. They are:
-Super Mario RPG (menus and gameplay are extremely buggy; big green, black, and pink things cover up most of the screen)
-Kirby Super Star (menus look fine, but during gameplay, a black bar covers up all but a thin section of the screen towards the middle)
-Donkey Kong Country 2 (the game works fine until a level that involves swimming, then the characters are clearly visible but the background seems to stay the same while I move, making those particular levels unplayable (the walls, platforms, and obstacles are in their usual spots))
-Donkey Kong Country 3 (see the description of underwater levels in DKC2, except this covers the entire game)
-F-Zero (menus and vehicles look fine, but the tracks are just big gray sheets of pixels that cover the bottom half of the screen)
-Mortal Kombat 3 (see Kirby Super Star, except the menus are barely visible)
It doesn't matter whether F-Zero works (we have F-Zero X on the Virtual Console), and MK3 isn't really a priority (we have the other two), but I like the rest of those games. After I try the games out at my grandmother's house to see if they work there (she has a SNES that we gave to her when we got it from one of my uncles), I'm not sure what I could do. I have a bunch of options available to me:
-get a new copy of the game (pros: they may be selling for cheap (except for games like SMRPG or KSS); cons: they might not be in good condition)
-download through the Virtual Console (pros: I can't lose the games, they're always in good condition; cons: I need to buy a Wii Points card, I can't take them with me)
-buy a portable version [only for DKC2, DKC3, SF2, and later, KSS] (pros: I can take them with me wherever I go, they improve on the original versions; cons: they might be fairly expensive (the first three might not be, but KSS for the DS will cost me about $50, and I'm not even sure when it's coming out!)
Unfortunately, for SMRPG, I have even less options available to me, because there is no portable version of it, I don't know when (if ever) it's coming out for the Virtual Console, and buying a new copy would probably be expensive. I realize that ROMs and emulators are a possible option, but I share a computer with four other people, so I'm trying to keep how much space my programs take up to a minimum.