Analogue consoles still are emulating the old game consoles, but they do so in a different way than a normal software emulator. This emulates the individual circuits of the device on a special chip called a FPGA. This has the advantage of supporting much lower input latency (say with real controllers) and video latency (down to the cycle for CRTs). This means your lightgun will work on a FPGA NES with connected CRT, along with making the system “feel” better (due to the lower latency).
Valetudo is fantastic. Unfortunately the rooting process for some robots is a decent amount of work, but once it’s up and run going it’s very solid.
I’ve been running two robots for two years now with no problems and no internet connections. Full mapping with zones.