You're not alone in this, nor is it a problem exclusive to emulation. I've worked a person who had been asked to restore film to a better quality before, and couldn't do it because it turned out that a major company had decided to 'archive' all of their film and audio in cable TV broadcast quality MPEG many, many years ago, disposing of the originals years ago because they took up too much space.
Of course that's a pity. But better than completely discarding movies by fear of self-combusting nitro celluloid material. That is to say, in 1950th cinema film copies still got systematically destroyed by their publishers to avoid spoiling rental of their new movies.
seen in docu "Nitro-Archipele"/"Archipels nitrate"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1718723/And the first seasons of "Doctor Who" even got deleted by the BBC to reuse the (at that time fairly expensive) video tapes, because they considered themself workers of performing art (like a stage theater), not makers of art objects (and were threatened to pay a fine for broadcasting repeats). Also "Monty Python's Flying Circus" only got saved from deletion because the actors bought the video tapes back. E.g. I am still missing many of the 1970th German school TV educational docus (like "Einführung in die Digitaltechnik") seen in childhood, those likely got discarded too by the broadcast stations by lack of monetary value.
