Game slowing and eventually stopping

I have started disc 2 and the game has slowed way down. It started as soon as Dagger, Steiner and Marcus got off of the tram for the second fight with Black Waltz 3.
The first time I thought the game had frozen & I restarted. The 2nd time I waited and the fight took place but I had to wait up to 5 minutes between selecting an action for a character and the action happening.
This continued through Burmecia and any load screens when I went from scene to scene.
I put up with it all the way through Treno (not doing anymore than I had to because my frustration level was quickly building). After the game switched back to Zidane and I exited Burmecia the wait time was longer and longer.
Finally as I entered Cleyra Trunk the game stopped entirely. It has now been 3 hours and I am still on a black screen. I can hear the sound of the sandstorm but no picture is loading.

I am playing on a large size PS2 and other PS1 games play just fine.

HELP!!

weird.. if your console plays other games just fine, it must be your game... is your game disc clean and unscratched? try borrowing someone else's disc to see if it does the same thing.

I just bought the Greatest hits version last week. It is a new disc & appears to be clean & unscratched. I have received "Disc Read Error" when trying to load the game. I try a few times & eventually is starts up.

I have put other PS1 & PS2 games in the machine & they play fine.

My son says my nephew has a PS2 also so I may take the disc & memory card over there tomorrow to see what it does in his machine.

Sometimes the PS2 console has trouble with the playback of games for older models even though it is designed to play them. That's probably why you are experiencing the disk read error. As for the slowing down and stopping I would agree with experimenting with another PS2 or game disk to find out if your hardware is playing up or not.

I used my nephew's PS2 & got through most of Clerya. I saved & restarted on my PS2 & now everything is working normally.

Weird!!

i