FF9 epsxe 1.7 issues

[fobsternd]

I'm trying to play ff9 (NTSC) on my emu but I am just hitting issues left and right and this might be the last straw for me.

First, the battle loading animation was missing and took forever to load the actual battle (about 10-15 seconds of black screen with music ok). I solved this by changing the video plugin to D3D v 1.77 and configured a bunch of settings according to Zorlon's advice from here.

Second, as I entered Cleyra from the wold map, the screen would go black and freeze there. And when i tried to restart the game and load from a previous save point, I realized that none of my saves were actually saved. So I had to go through the whole process of configuring the memory card to .mcr and went through this guide. I pretty much had to load save 17 from this list.

Third, I am now up to the point where Kuja is about to raze Alexandria with Bahamut, right after this, the screen goes black and freezes AGAIN.

My issue is that I don't want to load from another save point from that site because the items/gear/cards might not be the same. Even if it was slightly identical, I don't want to keep going through this especially at later points in the game when I'll be seriously farming for the ultimate weapons and cards.

Does anyone know why the iso is freezing?

Here are my computer's specs if it's relevant:

cpu: AMD FX 8350
gpu: Radeon R9 380 4G
ram: 8 gb ddr3
mobo: MSI 990FXA


EDIT: Instead of using the save state/load state, I decided to restart the emu and load the game from the last moogle save point and it seems that the game does not freeze at the aforementioned point. What is going on with this emulator?

I also decided to try the game using my actual physical CDs on a different computer (same emu and settings) and now the battle loading animation gets all screwy

[skullpoker]

This game is known to have problems like you described, they are common enough that if you search on Google you should be able to find solutions for game freezing at certain points.

Look into the RetroArch emulator. It does not use plugins, and emulates Playstation very well. It will take some work to configure everything when you first get it, and then you won't have to screw around with plugin settings again. You would be trading Customization options for increased stability and convenience. It also runs a wide variety of systems through different emulation Cores.