Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Either the Steam Deck or one of those Emulation PC handhelds. A Switch would probably be a poor choice since a modchip is required for most of them.

Any android handheld.

Steam Deck or Legion all the way. My Steam Deck can run anything starting from NES up to PS3 titles without issue and PC titles also aren't a problem (and there are even pretty good tools to automatically sync your saves between the deck and any other PC you have). The possibility of expanding the space with an SD card is very handy for Roms, which don't need tons of transfer speed to run fine. (although i also put smaller PC games on there which work fine, but loading times for larger games might become uncomfortable)

None explicitly support piracy of course. However, I know the Switch is very difficult to conduct piracy on. You might be lucky depending on the firmware, whether you could hack it, but you can't pirate on a Switch without hacking the firmware.

I personally would go with the Steam deck or the Legion (Linux and Windows respectively), pirating there will be relatively the same as you are used to on PC.

What do you plan on playing and what consoles do you want to emulate?

If you occasionally want to play 3ds games, get an Ayn Thor. Requires a bit of tinkering but once it's set up, it's an incredible retro gaming machine. Recently finished God of War 1 and 2 on it and had a great time!

Depends on what you want to play.

There's tons of emulation handhelds produced in the PRC. The android-based ones tend to have nicer ARM chips and decent screens, and Valve is working on ARM support for SteamOS. This gets you a less powerful but more efficient SteamOS handheld, which allows you to play tons of pirated games or emulated games. You can also stick with android and use native emulation software, including windows emulation for PC games.

Steam Deck is too expensive now, IMO, to recommend over these devices.

why not get an ambernic or something?

To give good advice I'd have to know what your budget is, and what systems and games you're most interested in playing.

For now I will just introduce you to the wonderful world of retro handhelds by way of a well known youtuber:

https://m.youtube.com/@RetroGameCorps/videos

Not sure what games you want to play, but maybe consider buying a telescopic controller instead of a full handled (because we're in ram shortage right now).

If you already have a decent phone, you can install mobile versions of most emulators and play using telescopic controller.

Start checking if you can run ppsspp, it's the easiest to setup.

psp?

Really depends what you’re looking for.

I personally hate playing 3DS games on Deck, but I have had good experience playing several games using Lutris (Played God of War 2016, Elden Ring, and Marvel’s Spider-Man) on Deck.

Emulation on Deck has been solid, but I’ve mostly stuck to Switch, GameCube and GBA games. Pokémon Legends ZA ran acceptably as well. I have Tears of the Kingdom, but haven’t installed it yet.

Tried Kingdom Hearts 2, and it seemed okay, but didn’t do much outside of launching it.

You likely already have a smartphone, so why not just get a controller that plugs directly into its USB-C port? Then load up whichever emulator you want. Chances are, your phone is considerably faster than most emulation handhelds anyway.

what kind of games do you want to play? I have a PS Vita that is loaded with old school roms. can play pretty much everytihng up to like the Dreamcast. NES, Master System, SNES, Genesis, N64, PSX, PSP, etc.

PS Vita is probably the best for retro gaming.