1. Tragically, ToP does not work in SNESticle so I guess I'll have to abandon getting it to work there... BUT!
2. I still have SNES9x, also on PS2, and if I can get this working in S9x, then it's *mostly guaranteed to boot on ps2.
But first, when you say zeroing out all the data in the ROM at file addresses 00FFB0-00FFFF, do you mean just replacing both 00FFB0 and 00FFFF with all zeros or something different? Cuz it's not showing any new results for me when I tried what I initially thought you meant.