I played each and every variation of the game known to GoodGEN and none would work, that's when I noticed that they all produced an SRAM file even though the game had no on-cart saving (or I am wrong in assuming SRAM = save function w/ battery ?).

So while trying the latest Kega, which is awesome btw, I found a "disable SRAM" function, and it made the copy-protection code fail. Hooray ! But still there are many unanswered questions here...