I've been playing a lot of Monster Rancher games lately, but I've run into a big problem with the first one: I can't save my game.

Whenever I go to the save screen, it looks fine at first, but once I select a card (regardless of which one I pick) the screen suddenly starts flashing the 'controller disconnected from port 1' message on and off very rapidly. (For anyone who doesn't know, disconnecting a controller in this game instantly pauses everything and displays this message until a controller is reconnected.) I can go back easily from there, but I cannot continue and save when this happens. I don't have this problem at any other point in the game, or with any other games (including Monster Rancher 2).

I have no other problems with the game - even the somewhat infamous disc swap/monster generation system works fine.

I'm using the PSX emulator version 1.13 (as far as I know, that's the name of it). Tried changing the controller type (dualshock vs. normal pad, for example) but that didn't matter - and again, I only have problems when trying to save. Plugins aren't really relevant to this one.

I've tried using PCSX reloaded, but I can never get the sound and graphics quite right on that despite messing with several setting and a couple different plugins, and the disc swap - a very important part of these games - doesn't work properly. I don't use epsxe because I've had a lot of problems with it in the past and didn't care for it.

I've google'd around a bit, but I haven't found anyone else who has had this same problem. Is anyone else familiar with this issue? Anyone have a fix?