You are way off with your recollection of 20 years old hardware (and its prices)

$400 buys you a decent laptop from 10 years before.

My $400 used Dell laptop from eBay is able to emulate PSX games and most PS2 games (albeit dipping in < 100% emulation speed at times) with its integrated Intel card.

20 years ago (2006) a $400 laptop from 1996 had a pre-Pentium CPU barely able to run Windows 95. In fact I’m not even sure you could find laptops that cheap, used or new.