I'm looking over the runs, and it seems running on real hardware is giving better load times. WR is able to load into the Radiator minigame about 2 full seconds faster than STAR_fox's run (whos load times match what I can get my emulator to do as well)

Any ideas on how to get an Emulator running at those speeds? Duckstation is giving me an entire 5 extra seconds on that load without any boosts, and still the 2 extra seconds when I turn read and seek speedup to 10x

While I don't know how to speed up the loading times for emulator, are you playing with sound turned off? If you turn sound off in the options menu it'll improve your loading times slightly.