I'm trying to run the NeogeoCD version of the LastBlade2 on nebula, and there seems to be problems with lagging and the screen blanking out for a few seconds.

The lag occurs when the game loads in stages, from the character selection screen to the "storytelling" animation before the first fight, there is a long pause with a black screen, the music and everything is stopped. Then after the introductory narration is done, I get another long pause (few seconds) with no music and a black screen. Then the game loads into the fighting scene, then right after one second when it's saying "ready" or something like that in japanese, the screen again goes black for a few seconds and with no music, then it goes back to normal for the rest of the match.

Are neogeoCD games just like that, or is it a problem with the rom, or rom/nebula combination (like would another emulator help)?

Thanks.

Iirc, the lastest nebula is a bit wonky with the neocd emulation. Find an older version and see how that plays out.

Use NeoRaine. It's far better than any other Neo-Geo CD emulator, and is updated quite frequently, whereas Nebula hasn't seen an update in ages and it's Neo-Geo CD portion even less updates.

I tried it for neoraine, yes it's much better now. With nebula the game was in japanese, but now it's in english, do you know why that is?

The loading screens are still there, but they are not black anymore, it seems that neocd games just have a lot of loading screens.

Most likely is has to do with the region switch of the emulated console, similar to what the actual Neo-Geo arcade games had.

Yes, Neo-Geo CD games have a lot of loading screens and in most games when played on the original hardware, the loading screens are excruciatingly long. This makes the CD versions often far worse than their MVS or AES counterparts. As far as Last Blade 2 CD is concerned, you don't really get anything else except the arranged soundtrack - even though many consider the CD version to be the definite version because of the arranged soundtrack.

According to http://snk.wikia.com/wiki/The_Last_Blade_2...sive_Characters
The NeoCD version seems to have a lot of additional content? When I tried it, it had POWER, SPEED and EX modes, the arcade version doesn't seem to have the EX mode. Do you know what it does?

All the hidden characters, excluding Musashi Akatsuki are present in the arcade version. Same goes with the EX version. EX mode is a combination of Power and Speed, giving you the best aspects of both modes. You need to input codes to enable the secret characters and EX mode (a sequence of button presses starting from a specific character) at the Character Selection screen.

As far as playing as Akatsuki goes, he's kind of nice to play as, although nothing too ground-breaking. As I haven't played the CD version, my experiences with Akatsuki are from the Neo-Geo Pocket version of the game