yeah a lot of more recent rips have been done with a lot more quality of play back.
Though CD-R's are not the best option, it's not the worst either, most games will run sweet from CD-R anyway with only a few that have issues with FMV or other slow data streaming (Crazy Taxi as an example does not load the map fast enough at times from CD-R so occasionally the road textures are not loaded in time or buildings seem to just pop up, for FMV there was only one game I can think of that I never got to run smoothly for FMV is Who Wants to be a Millionaire though I made an improved rip it still had a small amount of FMV lag) there is also the issue with the drive sound reading the CD-R's even with most the newer rips dampening this by moving the bigger streamed data closer to the inside of the disc as data is read quicker from the inside of the CD-R vs the outside
I do have some of my RIPs up on the main site as well as all the more modern RIPs I had anyway, some of my RIP's are for 99min CD-R though all the ones I done anyway are improved RIP's for example I have a RIP of Grandia II that is on 3 80min CD-R's but has nothing down sampled or removed but all other rips of that game down sample the FMV, the original game is on a single GD-ROM
The GameShark looks like it has a serial data pinout, not that unusual for devices by the original company to have there devices not to have the external output by have the pinout to have one anyway, I guess it might be possible to dump and restore with it, I am guessing the gameshark hardware is just a memcard though, or a simple access dongle or a bit of both, I don't know enough about the device to actually know though
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