So I decided to play the game on mednafen the other day. There were some graphic glitches on the sprites during the cinemas, but the game played fine. That is, until I encountered a cinema that couldn't be skipped and would stall out (black screen with the internal code waiting for something).
I did some research and mednafen has no issues with this since build 9.0 (I'm using 9.8..something or other).
So I ripped the bram data from the emulator save state, updated my SCD unit BRAM with it, burned the game, and continued to play it on that. Same thing happened. I decided to try it without the arcade card, and it played fine.
So either my arcade card is defective (as well as the mednafen even though it claims to run the game fine), or the game I have is bad dump (I sold off almost all my PCE/CD games a few years ago, so I don't own the original anymore). Usually a bad dump would be bad regardless of using a ACD or SCD card. Last I checked, and used, my Arcade Card worked just fine.
I wished I have ripped my games before selling them with turborip, so I'd know of it I had a good copy or not. But that's neither here nor there. So, anyone else run into this issue? I've played up to the very last level without problems using SCD (built in card).
Note: The image/dump itself is labeled: HECD4011