Unexplained crash on real hardware

I remember I used to play the megaman legends games with my brother and we managed to find a glitch we could trigger reliably that I never saw explained online anywhere. I was wondering if you guys had an idea what this is.

Get a real PlayStation 1 or 2. I have never had this work in an emulator. Start a new game. Play all the way through to the nino island ruins without rebooting or loading a save. You can write a save, but don’t load one and don’t reboot. When you climb the ladder to get out after beating the ruins, the game will crash and throw white text in a black screen, looking like a memory dump.

If you load from a save, this never happens. If you play all the way from the beginning, it happens about 80% of the time.

Years later and I never see this mentioned online. What did we see? What happened?