so, the problem is: the game needs a few frames to start each character after a continue.. if they all start at the same time, the program code will partially crash leaving some debug stuff on the screen. I'm pretty confident that this is a bug in konami's code, and would even be willing to bet money that if you wired all 4 start buttons to 1 button w/the PCB and tried continuing with it (or use the punch button), it would do the same thing.
I added a workaround for the 4p version, you'll have to use the start button to continue (by mapping all the start buttons to 1 button). Unfortunately there is no way to serialize the punch buttons without horribly affecting gameplay, so the start button will have to do.
best regards,
- dink