I looked around the internet a bit but I could not find any pictures of this screen from the game on an actual console. I also posted on SMS Power about it, as that seemed like the obvious place to ask, but got no response.
So if anyone can confirm if this behaviour is correct, or has any ideas on where else I should ask, please let me know so I can close the book on this one.
Thank you!
Judging by the sentence ending with an ! mark in your screenshot, is it really the music test screen?
1st: after starting the game after the intro and press start screen
2nd: game starts the intro text with 16 colors
- Game fades to black (insert Up+Start here for music test) games fades back, cutscene start
(no image required)
3rd: When intro done, it goes back to 32 palette.
4th: your screenshot's palette
What I see is that when the game would start, it already loads the "cutscene" palette (see the bottom row colors). If you would freeze the values of original colors address' before fading out (in RAM), you will see the it's much closer than the wrong palette one.
Have you tried asking on reddit? I'm not sure which subreddit would work, but maybe https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/ ? This forum seems rather obscure in comparison.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/ might provide more chance of people actually having hardware. Also can try http://segaage.com/ the less popular cousin to nintendoage.com