On his deathbed, will he wonder why he devoted himself to such a pointless cause?
I suspect most of ‘em are saved. If you look for “abandonware” on the net, you can find a lot of them - for free!
If you save the code, it is no big deal to run MOST of these games through an emulator. The MAME arcade emulator is VERY good for everything that doesn’t take an exotic controller, vector graphics or tape loop audio (Stratovox, Crazy Climber). It is NOTHING to emulate a Z-80 or 6502 (Coleco, Apple, Atari) and I’m sure there’s stuiff out there for Commodore 64 and VIC-20 as well. There’s no need to have a warehouse of old cassettes and floppies.