Ok, looks like I am my own savior. After testing some more settings over a few hours I found settings which are very playable. So, my platform is:
Windows Vista 32 bit
Core 2 Duo E8400 @3.00GHz
2 Gb RAM
ATI Radeon HD 3800
PCSX2 Playground 1.0.0395 VM
Gladius PAL version
ZeroGS fared slightly worse in comparison, with stutters on movies and an average of 5 FPS less so my settings of choice are:
GSDX 872m 0.1.12 SSE 41
*Windowed
*Direct3D10
*Native resolution
*Texture Filtering ON (gain extra 1-2 FPS when off, but looks better when on)
SPU2ghz Playground
*Nearest interpolation
*DirectSound
*Time Scaling ON
*Other ticks OFF
CPU
*Everything on the left ON
*Limit
Speed Hacks
*Disable Extra VU Flags ON
*Disable Extra FPU Flags ON (These flags gain 3-5 FPS with no visible glitches gained)
*(x2) Sync Hacks ON
*Overflow/Underflow hacks OFF (Turning these on caused glitches with light & impact effects)
Advanced
*Roundmodes Chop/Zero
*Flush to Zero ON
*Denormals are Zero ON
With the above settings I ran the game at 45-50 FPS. Sound time stretching was only barely noticeable at times and so far I encountered no crashes. On both GS plugins the spinning sword on the loading screen was (always has been) missing. I suspect that might be caused by floating point rounding and the blade might be hidden behind the black screen, lol. GSDX did have one slight graphical flaw. In the main menu some horizontal and vertical lines were visible, like texture border lines. I'll play some more and update if necessary.
P.S. The swing meter was a bit hard since the key response didn't seem as sharp as the controller response on the PS2.
