There seems to be two main variants of this game - one where you get swarmed with bats coming from all angles at certain points in each stage, and all the others variants, where you do not get swarmed. On all the variants where you do not get swarmed, the game crashes every single time at this point in stage 5:
Now, I distinctly remember this happening on real arcade hardware back in the late 80s / early 90s when I used to play it in a local arcade. I used to think this was due to it being a bootleg. However, this issue is present on most of the alt versions supported by MiSTer. Is this a well known bug? If so, should it be affecting the majority of alts?