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For me, the biggest value in emulation is playing the fan translations of games that were never originally made available in English. Some of my favourites:

Downtown Special: Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki Dayo Zenin Shuugou! http://www.romhacking.net/translations/226/

Romancing SaGa 3 http://www.romhacking.net/translations/416/

Seiken Densetsu 3 http://www.romhacking.net/translations/440/

(Note: None of those links will point you at the ROMs themselves, just translation patches.)

I thought half the fun was in NOT understanding the Japanese text ?

Hell yes. Also check out Wonder Project J 1 and 2. And then there's Star Fox 2, which is an awesome game that was never released.

Interesting (somewhat related) side note about the Virtual Console games: they are emulation shells around the original ROMs.

There are toolkits out there that will let you peel them apart and see / replace the resources inside. I used this to swap out one ROM for another so I could play the Nintendo NES version of Tetris on my Wii.

They should sell them on the app store and get it over with.