By personal experience, home systems only. I actually had quite a bunch of good third party games on N64, much more and better ones than on everything after it until Switch. Switch can overtake N64, not sure yet.

1. Super NES
2. NES
3. N64
4. Switch
5. GameCube
6. Wii
7. WiiU

Handhelds is more difficult, but I think I'd rank those the as follows. I think the two lines are too different to mix into one overall ranking though.

1. 3DS
2. DS
3. GB(C)
4. GBA

Hmmm. By quantity w digital- wii, switch, snes, nes, gcube, n64, wiiU. By quantity w out digital- wii, snes, nes, switch, gcube, n64, wiiU. By Quality- snes, nes, gamecube, switch, n64, wii, wiiU. Overall w generational lenience- snes, nes, gamecube, switch, n64, wii, wiiU. I would easily put switch over gamecube if not for digital shenanigans. Did u know megaman legacy 1 cart requires a patch to play? Rediculous. Gamecube had some pretty big 3rd parties. Prince of Persia was big at the time and the precursor to A creed imo, the 3d mortal kombats, res evil4 & remasters, viewtiful joe, xmen legends. 3rd parties moved on to xbox, but for a while it seemed like cube was gonna be the defacto 2nd console.

Glad to see im not the only 1 who foegot beyond food and ebil was on the cube :)

This, pretty much. I arrived and immediately thought of voting for the SNES, but this argument is too strong to be overseen, and the number of great 3rd party games on the Genesis/Mega Drive at the time is a fact that cannot be denied. NES was not only king of its time, but the place where so much of the magic started for many, many franchises.

SNES had awesome 3rd party games though, many classics indeed. FF VI, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Mortal Kombat 3, Mega Man X. I don't think these games aged badly. When I played Chrono Trigger in my DS I find it far superior to 99% of DS library, and it was in 2010 I guess

I'm not familiar with Dragon Quest franchise, but fans will probably argue DQ games issued for SNES are great

Like I said, Square's RPG and Mega Man X.  That's pretty much all you mentioned.  Except for MK3 which I don't think aged all that well.  

For home consoles only:
1. Switch - there is a tremendous volume of titles far beyond anything I’ve seen on a Nintendo console before.
2. SNES - The RPG golden age began here. While the third party games list is small compared to Wii and Switch, the games it did have include several of the all time greatest games ever.
3. Wii - There was a tremendous boom in creative third party software across all genres.... except new RPGs, which is why I have to put this one lower than SNES. But it DID have gems like Rune Factory Frontier, Little King Story, and the virtual console library. Including VC, this is the first console I owned over 100 individual games on. Switch is close to being the second.
4. N64 - while the library was small, it did have a several really standout exclusives.
5. NES - Lots of exclusives, but very few of them were high quality. Beat em ups and side scrollers were fairly good, but they got smoked by the SMD.
6. Wii U - Exclusive games were almost unheard of. Much of the time done better on other consoles. Usually because of the greater performance.
7. GameCube - Like Wii U, but an even blander library with gameplay/controls/content dumbed down or missing.

Basically, GameCube and Wii U fall into the category of “Yeah, Game X, Y, and Z are on the console, but I’d rather play them elsewhere for the better experience.”

NES falls into the “Yeah, but many of these are not as good as I remember.”

And the top 4 have ample exclusives and reasons for why you’d want to play the games on THAT console for those that aren’t exclusive.

SNES's lineup is so strong that even if you don't like JRPGs (like me) and have to therefore cross off many of its third party big guns, it can still come out on top just through the sheer breadth of quality titles across multiple genres. Call me a heretic but Final Fantasy/Chrono Tigger/Secret of Mana aren't my cup of tea. R-Type or Demon's Crest on the other hand...

I dont agree with that pick, but I still like it.  I think nes and snes are clear leaders, but Cube was the last time I felt like the 10do versions of multiplat games had decent parity w the other versions. Only thing that was a little annoying about the 10do versions was using the cube controller. But really as far as quality 3rd party ports I think it hits 3rd place. Actually maybe 1st since most of the anes era 'multiplats had distinct differences. Oh man atarting to ramble. Ima leave it at that. Nice pick. 

Did u play guardian legend? What did u think? (if so)