I finally get my hands on the latest desmume after much fiddling around with an older 0.7 version and NO$GBA.
And I get this on all games I try:

Had a quick scan through the source to see if there was anything obvious, but I've never done any real 3d or graphics programming so the effort was kinda futile.
Any suggestions as to what could be happening here are much appreciated.

I'm using a crappy Trident Cyber-XP4 (xp4m32) laptop chipset, but it handles playstation & n64 emulation very well so I'm not sure if that's the issue. Sometimes it has problems with OpenGL, but Direct3d always works fine (and unfortunately there aren't any 3d drivers in Linux).

Edit: the problems only happen when using the OpenGL renderer, likely a driver issue, but other games work fine with OpenGL.