made a repro of cocoron and it's randomly restarting, freeze

so this is about my 20th repro I'm adding to my collection and it's actually the first one to give me problems. It plays fine at first but then it will randomly restart. when you get to the point where the elephant thing floats up on the pink screen JUST before you make your character it freezes every time at this point. any time between that at turning it on the game randomly restarts.

Sounds to me like the PRG ROM isn't quite properly written. I know sometimes old EPROMs are finicky. You may want to try using alcohol and a toothbrush over paper towel to wash off any excess flux from the PRG pins too, that often fixes random freezing for me.