I love my MiSTer, and I don't regret buying it, but I'd be lying if I said it was "worth" it; software emulators for every system that the MiSTer runs already exist and have gotten very good.
I bought my MiSTer mostly as a "how neat is that?" purchase. I think it's kind of cool to not only be able to run the games, but have a direct recreation of the hardware to do it. I wish I could regale you with tales of lower latency and how it has made me better at Donkey Kong Country, but I feel like most of the differences I see are probably placebo, especially since I just plug it into an LCD TV, not some fancy low-latency OLED or a period-accurate CRT.
If your goal is to play SNES games, you're likely to have a comparable (or even better) experience downloading Higan or something, but even if it's placebo, something about it feels more accurate to me.
I bought my MiSTer mostly as a "how neat is that?" purchase. I think it's kind of cool to not only be able to run the games, but have a direct recreation of the hardware to do it. I wish I could regale you with tales of lower latency and how it has made me better at Donkey Kong Country, but I feel like most of the differences I see are probably placebo, especially since I just plug it into an LCD TV, not some fancy low-latency OLED or a period-accurate CRT.
If your goal is to play SNES games, you're likely to have a comparable (or even better) experience downloading Higan or something, but even if it's placebo, something about it feels more accurate to me.
Plus FPGAs are just cool.