Okay, here is my official report. RC1 seems to have a problem saving progress in general. No record of score, tours, or unlocks. This is on hw and in emu. I checked to see if save ram files were being created on my cartridge, and nothing shows up. EmuHawk doesn't create a save file either. Kega does create an sram file, but progress doesn't save there either. Hope this helps.
Really interesting thanks.. of course it works fine on my emulators - Blastem, Kega, Gens, and Mame. Other people are getting crashes on real hardware after the character select, so that sounds like it's probably save game related as well.
Anyway thanks again for testing, I've probably done something silly. I'll wait until my real hardware arrives, then I can test it properly.
Cheers!