The TNS-HFC5 and FX4 are pretty hard to come by, and I don't know if Terra Network Systems in Japan is still selling them, but what you would do is insert an SD card and it would play the first NSF on the root of that card, and there were buttons on the cart to play/stop and whatnot. As for the FX4, you had several connectors that would be used to insert cartridges for games like Akumajou Densetsu (VRC6), Just Breed (MMC5), and King of Kings (N163), so that meant you would use the actual cartridges of games that used expansion audio, only if you wanted to play expansion audio NSFs. This also means that you could also play multichip NSFs (basically NSFs that use more than one expansion chip, which are made using 0CC-FamiTracker, but as far as I know, the only software NSF player that supports this is NSFPlay). There is another way of playing NSFs on real hardware, through something called the Analogue NT Mini, a console that plays NES games through HDMI. It has a built-in NSF player that plays NSFs stored on the SD card, but as far as I'm concerned, the only player I ever use is NSFPlay, since it has pretty good 5B emulation, as of the latest beta, since it seems to play ImATrackMan's 5B NSF properly, though I'm told that VirtuaNSF does a better job at the 5B.
As for clones of the AY-3-8910, nothing beats the original. As far as I know I haven't found a way of making AY-3-8910 music, since I refuse to recreate them using samples in ImpulseTracker. Funny you mention clones, because there is an Android app that I have called ZXTune. It allows you to play different console formats, one of them being the .AY file format. You can change how the built-in emulator handles the files too. For example, you can switch between the AY-3-8910 and the YM2149 in the options menu, which of course, makes the file sound a bit different. While in the AY-3-8910 mode, you can change the clock speed to different preset clock speeds from different computers that used it, such as Amstrad CPC (1 MHz), Atari ST (2 MHz), Taganrog (3.5 MHz), Pentagon (1.75 MHz), and ZX Spectrum (1.77 MHz).