I tested it with the standard 1.5 times overclock setting on the latest version of ePSXe on their site. Like you said gameplay didn't seem too different other than the BGM playing faster and coming in choppy. If load times are the issue with the run though I'll be sure to check out the differences.

As for accuracy, BIZhawk on default settings for me seems to run notably slower than ePSXe but because I don't have another PC to run the emulator on I ran the game, the stream, and the timer all on the same machine so I don't know how much of that if any might have compromised my performance as well. Would you mind telling me if you emulated on an isolated machine when you ran your times? Or did you also run all of your software on a single machine?

BIZhawk and ePSXe are listed as the approved emulators but I'm wondering if there is any sort of information as to how different settings compare to real hardware (primarily fast disc/region variants) and what may be considered unfair or illegitimate.

I used ePSXe with the default recommended settings for my run because it seemed to perform better on my machine than BIZhawk (both of which performed better than my disc on PS1 but not my PS2 with fast disc speeds) but still if there's any information or resources I'd appreciate it!

P.S. Overclocking on ePSXe seems to mimic fast disc speeds up to the audio glitches but again I'm unsure as to the validity of a run that would implement those settings.

Thank you.