I tried ff9 on ePSXe 1.6.0 and the game and the savegames are working just fine.I was using P.E.Op.S. Soft Driver 1.17. On Pete's OPENGL2 driver 2.8 it was working so slow.Probably because of my laptop specs.Also I didn't have any problems with the sound and cd reading.
I tried it on ePSXe 1.5.2 also and it was lagging a little.Not much but a little yes.Anyway,every game for psx which I have I tried on both versions and they all work better on 1.6.0 I don't know why you have troubles with ff9 on 1.6.0
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Standard programmer in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 C# Express Edition...
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