it got broken by some open_bus change, I guess. I tested the game two days ago and it was working (still with the window mask bug present).
now I'm going to see a movie. I'll look for the fix it as soon as I'm back, if Kale does not find it before then
as a temporary workaround, it's enough to replace some "return open_bus_read" I added this morning in snes_bankN_r (N=1,...,7) with "return 0xff". it seems at least one of them was wrong...