Burning PS1 Backups. About to tear my hair out

[DenverNugs]

Today I came into possession of a PSone with an MM3 modchip installed. I cannot for the life of me get ANY game to work correctly either testing it in Epsxe or on the modded PS1 itself. I've tried Maxell, Sony, and Verbatim CD-R discs and cannot get a single game to boot up. I've tried every guide google has to offer and every program suggested (Imgburn, Alcohol, Discjuggler, CDWIN, Nero, etc)

The first thing that comes to mind for me is the burner. The lowest speed that it will support is 16x. I understand it's better to burn these games at a lower speed, but if that was the problem wouldn't the game at least boot up? From what I've read usually burning at a higher speed will simply cause FMV scenes to be choppy and audio not playing correctly. No disc I've ever burned has worked even when loading from my drive in Epsxe. I've tried burning from cue and bin with no luck and converting them to an iso and burning won't work either. I've tried multiple games with multiple rips, the rips themselves play fine in Epsxe loading from the hard drive, but no dice when loading from CD.

What about my Burner (ASUS GH95N) is causing this? Drivers are fully updated. After a burn I can see all the files burned correctly on the disc, the damn things just refuse to play in anything. Assuming my drive is the problem, what exactly am I doing wrong in the process?

Does anyone own an external burner that they KNOW burns PS1 games without any issues whatsoever? I've wasted about 4 hours and about 22 discs on this and it's driving me crazy.