Okay, so now that I've got the game working (I took a few days for the new Metroid game), I want to see if I can iron out the last bit for Grandia. For anyone who hasn't played it, it's an isometric RPG with simple 3D environments and sprite characters. It doesn't seem like it should be too difficult of a game for the emulator, but it seems to have some quirks.
First thing I did was the usual stuff. Turned off Audio Sync to try and get a bit better of a frame rate. It's playable at this point, but the cutscenes are a bit weird because of it. If the audio finishes before the text display does, it will restart the current audio clip. I think that if I can get the frame rate up just a touch more, then the problem shouldn't come up as often since the text is progressing faster.
Since the post above mine says that Audio Reverb and Sound Interpolation should help with crackling, I turned both of those on, with Interpolation set to simple. It doesn't seem to hurt speed, so why not? Another earlier post stated that EBOOT versions for the PSP will run slightly faster, so I turned my ISO into an EBOOT for that reason.
Now, here's the part that gets me. This game seems to tie the text display to the frames. If I turn on frame-skip at all to try and get a bit more speed out of the game, it completely screws up the text windows. Text doesn't display correctly, often missing letters or displaying the wrong ones. There doesn't seem to be a setting to adjust how the text is displayed (it goes by letter with no setting for by word or all at once), so if I want to be able to read anything at all, which is important for an RPG, I'm not going to be able to fiddle with the frame-skip option.
Are there any other speed-up settings that I can mess with to try and get that last little bit?