I was fooling around with the Disassembly-thing... and I got the game running... past the 3rd battle! Unfortunately, I have been completely unable to reproduce the result. I was able to make a new save game, (I should have made a save-state! WTF was I thinking?!) but it doesn't work. When I load it just sends me to the same, endless black-screen. 
I was playing around with all kinds of settings, so I'm not sure how I was set up. The last thing I did was turn off "Ignore Illegal Reads/Writes". I hit "go" in the Disassembly, and it loaded up... FAST.
I *think* I altered the following:
VBO = on
Read Framebuffers to Memory (GPU) = on
I'm not entirely sure because after I got it to work, I reset the emulator. I tried to load the new save, and it failed. The whole thing locked-up at that point. When I re-started the emulator, my options were all reset.
My guess is that I was able to skip a certain part of the code that's causing the problem. I tried to play around and remember where I was at, but I have no idea. Nor do I remember the exact settings. I just hope something can be gained from this info. (Though I imagine it's not very useful.)
Edit: I turned on the VBO while it was paused on an illegal memory read. When I resumed, it IMMEDIATELY went to the audio-loop-error. It also inserted this:
idle0 I[HLE]: GLES\Framebuffer.cpp:1116 Drawing the framebuffer <04000000>
idle0 E[HLE]: c:\buildagent\work\acf56f986e98e7c9\core\hle\sceKernel.h:446 Kernel: Bad object handle 0 <00000000>
idle0 E[HLE]: c:\buildagent\work\acf56f986e98e7c9\core\hle\sceKernel.h:446 Kernel: Bad object handle 0 <00000000>
idle0 E[HLE]: HLE\sceKernelEventFlag.cpp:370 sceKernelClearEventFlag<0, fffffffe> - error
Vista32 0.8.1-716
I was playing around with all kinds of settings, so I'm not sure how I was set up. The last thing I did was turn off "Ignore Illegal Reads/Writes". I hit "go" in the Disassembly, and it loaded up... FAST.
I *think* I altered the following:
VBO = on
Read Framebuffers to Memory (GPU) = on
I'm not entirely sure because after I got it to work, I reset the emulator. I tried to load the new save, and it failed. The whole thing locked-up at that point. When I re-started the emulator, my options were all reset.
My guess is that I was able to skip a certain part of the code that's causing the problem. I tried to play around and remember where I was at, but I have no idea. Nor do I remember the exact settings. I just hope something can be gained from this info. (Though I imagine it's not very useful.)
Edit: I turned on the VBO while it was paused on an illegal memory read. When I resumed, it IMMEDIATELY went to the audio-loop-error. It also inserted this:
idle0 I[HLE]: GLES\Framebuffer.cpp:1116 Drawing the framebuffer <04000000>
idle0 E[HLE]: c:\buildagent\work\acf56f986e98e7c9\core\hle\sceKernel.h:446 Kernel: Bad object handle 0 <00000000>
idle0 E[HLE]: c:\buildagent\work\acf56f986e98e7c9\core\hle\sceKernel.h:446 Kernel: Bad object handle 0 <00000000>
idle0 E[HLE]: HLE\sceKernelEventFlag.cpp:370 sceKernelClearEventFlag<0, fffffffe> - error
Vista32 0.8.1-716