in my rough testing of my ePSXe run vs Ricky's console run, it seems that ePSXe was losing roughly 2 minutes of time in loads compared to console (about 6 seconds per loading screen.) Seems like console is significantly faster as far as I can tell. just putting this info here in case anyone ever cares enough to optimize this.

this also may just be down to ePSXe's general inaccuracy, tbh it was just the first thing I got working so I was using it.