Is there a green or red outline on the 0% text? If it's a green outline (and using the select button brings up the settings menu), then the emulator itself should be running(although at less than 1% speed).
The latest commits for the next release (already in source control) does improve the speed somewhat (on PC about a 75% speed increase by simply not rendering and parsing(filtering) non-rendering sound channels (which are pretty much all 24 MIDI rendering channels that aren't rendering any audio yet or anymore).
I did notice (using JPCSP, don;t remember the version off the top of my head) that it was in fact running last time I tested it, just very slowly.
Edit:
Somehow it's having at least some difficulty running even somewhat running, at least in cycle-accurate mode.
IPS clocking mode starts the app almost instantly (save for the disk accesses, which are slow anyways due to the memory stick being used).
Cycle-accurate mode seems to be way slower at that. That seems to have been about 5 minutes just starting up the emulator using it's first few instructions somehow (those are only about 10 instructions to start the whole thing, which is weird because that happens only only when initializing the emulator and displaying the yellow text (it's an emulator escape wrapped in a simple call wrapper which starts the actual thread). That's observing the delay between the first and second memory stick accesses(listing the ROM directory, loading all avaiable ROMs). This happens twice during startup: once when loading the emulator initially, and another time when resetting it to start the proper emulation (unless the internal BIOS is used, which foregoes the second step).
That's pretty weird.
Edit: Just let it run in cycle-accurate mode for 2.5 hours... It checked a whopping 160KB of memory when posting!
So both modes are running. It's just that the cycle-accurate mode is somehow really ridiculously slow on the PSP. IPS clocking mode seems way faster.