I tried playing a CD-R copy of Vib-Ribbon using the hotswap method on my PS2 and didn't get very far. Loading the tutorial freezes the game and trying to play the regular mode just results in it requesting the game disc is inserted. I think the issue is that since the game is designed to work with any audio CD, it has additional checks to ensure a genuine disc is in the system. I haven't been able to fool it with further hotswappery and I doubt there would be any easy way to do so. Perhaps an ISO hack would be possible but I wouldn't know where to start.

There's also the option of just using an emulator, but I'm doubtful that would work as the emulator would need some sort of multi-disc support, preferably using a physical CD drive, and to bypass the game's piracy check without causing issues in the process.

It could also be that I've messed up the burning process as the game uses multiple tracks much like Pepsiman (the first being data, the rest being standard CD audio), which when I tried playing had no music, although the music does show up in the PlayStation's CD player software. I don't think this is contributing to the issue, but it's a possibility.

Maybe asking two things in an already rather long post is a bit much, but is it possible to get NTSC-J PS1 games to not run in PAL mode when hotswapping? I tried using GSM to resolve it but just ended up with a picture stretched to about twice the height it should be.