Ok, I've kind of made some progress. I made a backup of one my ORIGINAL NTSC CD-rom games (midnight club) using CDR-Win, and then burned it onto a Fujifilm Cd-R. guess what? It STILL doesn't run on my PS2!!!
So I guess the problem isn't really conversion to NTSC. It's that my backups are not "backing up" correctly. Is there some sort of a "trick" to booting up backups with a magic 3.1 on V4 PS2? If not, then please tell me if I'm doing something wrong with my back-up. Should I try cloneCD instead of CDR-win? How about if I change the CD-R I'm using. Fujifilm is a pretty good brand.
Here's exactly what I'm doing:
Open CDR-win 3.9c
Extract sector button (3rd button to the right)
Make sure extract cue button is selected.
Uncheck "RAW" button
Pick a name for the image
Click on extract -- it goes successfully
Put in a blank Cd-R
Record button (first button)
Load Cues (somefile.cue)
Record (RAW button is unchecked) - it goes successfully
Place Cd-R in Ps2
Push standy button (one tap only)
It goes straight to browser/config screen
Select browser -- it says "reading disc, reading disc, reading disc"
"Disc read error"
