I tried the CD version on a Polymega with their BIOS and one sideloaded (NeoGeo CDZ), and got a mostly white screen. This even covers the playfield in-game. Is there something that I could've done wrong?
That's the only version the Polymega semi-officially supports. They even check hashes. I even tested with unibios for CD and CDZ, same result. From what I've found, they use a modified version of MAME for Neo-Geo CD support.
Double-checked the card.. when I swapped in a different bios, it was misnamed. Put the real CDZ bios back in place with the right name.. worked like a charm. I'd never seen the NGCD bios startup before. Both versions of the game work now.