I'm still not sure why the NES Virtual Console palette was so dark. My most guess was that it was trying to stay out of the automatic-brightness-limiter range that CRT TVs at the time had. This way the dynamic range between levels was preserved. Oddly none of the other VC emulators had that issue, so maybe it was just incompetence.

3DS VC improved things a bit with each colour palettes tuned for each game, though it brought it's own weirdness.

For pretty CRT gaming, I still recommend the Wii. It's straightforward to hack and install retroarch on and you can benefit from the component video out with many cheap and nice TVs. RetroArch can still be a bear to configure for novices, and the Wii can be a tad underpowered, but the good IO makes up for it. It also has oodles of plug and play controller options.

Sadly there's not too many other ways to take advantage of the 240p Y/Pb/Pr on consumer TVs with emulation.