Game works perfectly fine until I enter a battle, and then I find myself lacking the commands menu. You know, the bar that shows Attack, Magic, Item, etc? Yeah, I don't have that. Anybody know how to fix it?
What emulator do you use ? Try ePSXe 1.7.0 with Pete's OpenGl driver on "nice" settings. And I think there's some fix for FF IX
Use Psxfin, much much better than ePSXe, you don't need to config any settings except keyboard one. Try it.
ePSXe is in general much more compatible. The only reason people like the other emulators is because you don't have to configure them with plugins. But the lack of plugins reduce their compatibility.