You don't need to burn the game to emulate it on ePSXe, as you said, you can run the image file and play it that way.

If you already have the image file extracted, since you didn't mention what plugins gave you that black screen, have a look at the configuration suggested in the PSX datacenter page to see if it helps:

http://ks23364.kimsufi.com/psxdata/d...sc-u_list.html