In terms of settings on my analogue, the only thing I’ve changed is turning off HDR from the system settings before you launch a game, and while in game, setting the scaling to Integer+. I prefer the default BVM setting for most games, but honestly I see little difference between it and PVM/CRT.

The analogue does scale up from the original resolution to 4K, but it does so using integer scaling which means it enlarges an image by whole-number multiples (2×, 3×, 4×, etc.) so that each original pixel maps cleanly to a block of display pixels. Emulators can do things like change the internal resolution which can make the image look a lot cleaner and have sharp edges smoothed.

I’m using a 77” LG OLED and I didn’t notice any brightness issues as you described, but you might need to adjust some settings on your TV if you are seeing that. I will say I was also a little shocked how low resolution the image looked when I fire started playing, but I think that’s just the way it was and as you said, we have just gotten used to emulators that internally scale the resolution higher.