Completely off topic, but is there any real reason NO$ is still the fastest? I always just put the compatibility problems down to it being so old, but is it a case of putting speed over compatibility, or is he (whoever made it) just that good?

Ended up switching over because Desmume is faster for me now and runs more stuff. Also save states, though whether thats good or bad I haven't decided. Just struck me as odd that other emus are only just catching up to it for speed.

I got past it fine. You just need to save occasionally. Before my game ever crashed (Including the big black boxes in the middle of the road in violet city etc), the sprites went all messed up. When the sprites go dodgy, save via the ingame save system, and lod that. That fixes the sprites and lets you carry on. It's quite frequent, had to do it three times - once in sprout tower, once walking from the tower to the gym, and once part way through route 36.

Running it on 1x resolution with bilinear, which is about the size of 2x.

Seems to happen a lot more often if you speed up the game, too.