For anyone who's experiencing the crash at start, here's a possible workaround: Load the unpatched rom into your emulator and play through the character creation until you're dumped in your room. Save the game and exit out of the emulator. Rename the save file you just created to match the name of the patched rom's save. Load the patched rom and you should have a working save you can load from, bypassing the info screen crash.
Edit: Okay, that probably won't work due to the differences in the patched/unpatched roms. The last resort would be to start up and save the game in a known working emulator that uses the same type of savefile that your preferred emulator uses. For example, use VBA-M on pc to create a (.sav) savefile after the character creation, then copy it to a handheld device and load it into an emulator there.