Was recently made aware of Duckstation as a more accurate emulator compared to ePSXe. I've read the current sticky and the linked rules but some potential quality of life enhancements were not explicitly covered that I hope could be clarified. Namely stuff like the Internal Resolution Scaling and Texture filtering options amongst some other visual enhancement settings.

In addition to that, with the availability of FDS on PS2 hardware and other speedrun titles allowing the use of the Read Speedup option, I'm curious if there's a specific reason this is not permitted?

Just curious on these things. I'm currently working with a friend who's doing active speedruns on ePSXe and potentially considering moving to Duckstation and want to dial things in.

For now, we'd prefer as little enhancement setting usage as possible, in case visual enhancements give new visual cues that aren't present on console via jagged edges or anything like that. However, we're still debating / looking at that sort of thing, so it may change eventually. For now I'd say hold fire and wait for news.

The reasoning we've always disallowed artificially speeding up emulators is that they're not entirely accurate to official releases of the game. They don't lag in the correct places, leading to some places where emulator saves time over the official release. Traditionally, it's been viewed that the fastest way to play the game should be via some official release, and not something that's only faster due to imperfect emulation by a 3rd party. Furthermore, the objective of PS1 emulators is to emulate a PS1, not a PS2 with FDS. Therefore we almost always stick to the standard of "use the emulator recommended settings".