The you probably don't know much about it then, so let me tell you come things when it comes to the DC.
1. The GD-ROMm motor is quite audible. Whenever it reads any kind of disc, you can always hear it. In the case of playing movies, it means it will constantly be reading the disc because it can not load 600+ MB into it's RAM.
2. The reason why your emulators don't work is probably because they aren't self-boot or need a boot disk. If you want, I can help atleast help you with the self-boot part, but I don't know about the boot disk considering the only I have is like 3 years old and doesn't like to copy.
That's all I can tell you to answer your questions right now.