You could run this emulator against other "native emulators" (I understand your meaning but surely you see the humor there) and compare and contrast the CPU/mem

You could run this emulator against other "native emulators" (I understand your meaning but surely you see the humor there) and compare and contrast the CPU/memory usage today. I expect you'll be surprised - basing this on my experience developing rendering engines in C# and C++, though I cannot speak for Java. In any case you don't need a time machine to test your hypothesis.