Just got the newest ePSXe, looking for optimal configuration/plugins

[ForteMP3]

Topic says it all, I'm trying to get the best performance out of ePSXe that I can. Anyway, here's my specs.

IWILL KK266 Motherboard
1.3 ghz AMD Athlon
256MB RAM
ATI Radeon 64MB VIVO (Video In/Out)
C-Media Onboard Sound
I'm running on ISOs, so CDROM usage isn't an issue. Anyway, what I'm looking for is a setup mainly for Squaresoft titles, Chrono Cross and FF9 in particular, both of which use a lot of framebuffer effects. Also, back when I was using 1.4, I noticed Chrono Cross and FF9, even when they ran at full speed, didn't play music at full speed, it was just a little bit slower than it should have been, which seems kind of odd...Any idea on what may be causing this?
Finally, I remember that I had all sorts of audio playback issues with MDECs, and this was with ISOs mind you, any idea what kind of settings would cause audio skipping/errors in MDECs? Also, while audio was buggy, the actual videos played fine.

[Kane]

There are already threads on this. I suggest you search them out. The sound problem happens if you use anything but the internal plugin and have SPU irq turned on in ePSXe (not the plugin). Turn it off in ePSXe, and then on in the plugin.

[RhombusYSS]

Yeah a good solution is to enable the specific fix for the Square games in Eternal's SPU - basically just an SPU IRQ hack, but it seems to work better than other plug-ins I've tried. The timing issues are not a problem at all, and it emulates the music and SFX almost perfectly.

[ForteMP3]

I've tried using Eternal, but I end up having, well, what I can only describe as hanging notes. A note plays, and then continues to play, even though it should have stopped playing.

Also, I'm trying to figure out what I did that caused the wierdest thing to happen:I got battle swirls working without slowdown in FFIX. O.o;
Anyway, here's what I'm currently using, vid setting wise (I tried using Framebuffer Move on Read and Framebuffer Read, but for some reason FFIX hangs when New Game is selected with this on)

Plugin: Pete's OpenGL Driver 1.1.58
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
GFX card: Radeon 7200 DDR x86/MMX/3DNow!

Resolution/Color:
- 640x480 Fullscreen - Desktop changing [32 Bit]
- Keep psx aspect ratio: off

Textures:
- R8G8A8A8
- Filtering: 3
- Garbage collection: on
- VRam size: 64 MBytes

Framerate:
- FPS limitation: on
- Frame skipping: off
- FPS limit: 60

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 3
- Framebuffer texture: 2
- Alpha multipass: on
- Mask bit: off
- Advanced blending: on

Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Line mode: off
- Unfiltered FB: off
- Dithering: off
- Screen smoothing: off
- Full vram: off
- Game fixes: off [00000000]

Any idea what settings I need to modify if I want to see battle swirls and other framebuffer effects? I realize this has been addressed in other topics, but most of them seem to revolve around Ge-Force cards, and I'm running on a Radeon Vivo (Which is apparently similar to a 7200 series)

[Kane]

Try using the settings from the GeForce cards. If that don't work, enable full vRam primatives and set framebuffer mode to 0.
As regards your hanging notes prob, I dunno, but here is my config.