The game requires a wiimote so that's sort of out of the question for awhile. Can I just ask why PS2 emus are banned?
I did my first run on Dolphin because I don't have a capture card and didn't want to deal with trying to do video recordings. I've got an above-average PC - Alienware 13, 16GB RAM, Intel i7-5500U (2.4GHz), Nvidia 960M GPU. While it certainly isn't top-of-the-line, it's still decent by today's standards. When I was doing my first run (which was more of a test than anything - I definitely did ¤not¤ expect to get within 11 seconds of WR), it handled itself okay, after I tweaked a bunch of the settings (I was also using Ishiiruka Dolphin, which trades some emulation accuracy for much better performance).
For the most part, everything was fine - I was able to get a stable 60fps in almost every area, such as the house, the main outside area, the back road with the well, Bobinsky's flat, Spink and Forcible's flat, and all of the equivalent Other World locations (though I got slightly lower fps outside in the Other World - stablized around 55fps instead of 60).
But in a few specific areas - namely, the three dream sequences and the two barn levels - my FPS absolutely ¤tanked¤, and frequently fluctuated between 35-45fps (and even ¤less¤ on standard Dolphin when I was originally doing testing). I have no idea why it's these specific areas, and ¤only¤ these specific areas - but if I had to guess, it's probably a combination of higher-than-average particle effects (in the dream sequences), and a higher-than-average object density in the small spaces (in the barn levels, which makes the Wii's standard culling much less effective - and thus slows down the emulator even more).
TL;DR: unless you have an ultra-beefy PC, even Dolphin can't handle the game all that well, and console's the only way to go. The only reason I got so close to WR is probably because (1) the PS2 version is super slow, and (2) the game's still incredibly unoptimized, what with only two runs in total (including mine). I'm probably gonna do a second attempt on console eventually and see if I can push my time down/beat WR, but that's not on my priorities list at the moment.
