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An Arduino is a small, single board computer that you can program to act like various things, in this case probably a cartridge simulator so it feeds a ROM image to the host machine which thinks it is reading a cartridge. The various Raspberry Pi devices also fall into this category of devices, perhaps in particular the Pi Zero.

2 hours ago, carlsson said:

An Arduino is a small, single board computer that you can program to act like various things, ... The various Raspberry Pi devices also fall into this category of devices, perhaps in particular the Pi Zero.

Depending upon the processor, most Arduino boards would be classified as microcontrollers rather than computers.  Computers are typically focused on interacting with people while microcontrollers are typically focused on interacting with external devices. 

 

There are numerous models of Arduino with significant differences between them.  There are also many clones (as the original design is open source) and "Arduino" boards which share some similarities (usually the processor or the I/O interface) without being a direct clone.

 

Usually you would either buy an Arduino (or other SBC) to satisfy a particular set of requirements (e.g. I bought a Raspberry Pi Pico to read a thermistor and report the temperature over USB and a Raspberry Pi 3A for emulating old arcade games).  However there are also "experimenter kits" which include an SBC and various external devices which can be used for various simple projects.

 

Note: A Raspberry Pi (except for the Pico) is a computer with a lot of General Purpose I/O available for interfacing with external devices.  The Pico is definitely a microcontroller.  A computer typically runs an operating system (often Linux) whereas a microcontroller is programmed (using a computer) to execute a specific set of programs.