Is this a bad ISO?

[Trickfilm]

Hi, I've been playing FF8 for the first time in YEARS and every so often the emulator would seem to hang. For example when on the world map (just walking around) or after a battle (loot scene, fade to black, but doesn't come back to the game field). Usually I could just restart the emulator and play from my last save () and it'd get past that section, but I've come to a spot where it hangs in an FMV and can't get past it no matter how many times I try.

I imagine it's probably a bad ISO. My disc is pretty worn - it is oooold, and my FF9 ISOs made from slightly newer discs don't have this problem. But I was hoping maybe it's a problem with my emulator settings?

Here are my video settings:

Plugin: Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.8
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
GFX card: GeForce 8800 GTX/PCI/SSE2

Resolution/Color:
- 800x600 Window mode
- Internal X resolution: 2
- Internal Y resolution: 2
- Keep psx aspect ratio: off
- No render-to-texture: off

- Filtering: 4
- Hi-Res textures: 2
- TexWin pixel shader: on 
- VRam size: 0 MBytes

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

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 2
- Framebuffer effects: 3
- Framebuffer uploads: 2

Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Mdec filter: on 
- Screen filtering: on 
- Shader effects: 0/1
- Flicker-fix border size: 0
- GF4/XP crash fix: off
- Game fixes: on  [00004002]

Plus I am running the FF8 individual fixes.

I have the usual glitches like black battles swirls on the world map (but normal ones when starting battle from the field screen) but I've found my setup to be pretty nice otherwise. Is there anything I could tweak that could maybe get me past this?

If not I guess I'll have to buy another FF8 from ebay. I'll probably get a PAL one so I don't get the Rinoa/missile base error, you know the one. So my second question is: is there any way to convert NTSC saves to PAL ones? I really don't want to have to start all over again.

[jonc2006]

the settings look fine to me, however you might want to disable the hi res texture setting because that can cause glitches in games with 2d or pre-rendered backgrounds such as the FF games. what format is the image that you have in? i believe there is a way to covert the saves like that but im not 100% because ive never had to do anything like that myself. you can check this site for something that might do that.