Ha, it's not the CDROM, but I know what it is at last! You've given me an idea when you said CDROM though, and I saw that the one who started this thread uses Mandriva. The "problem" seems to be with supermount. It's a kernel patch, I hear that Mandriva uses it in all its kernels, I use it too. You …

Well I'll be damn, I just played around with MALLOC_CHECK_ and if I set it to 1 DOSBox works! According to this , that value causes the malloc checker to print errors to stdout. And indeed, I get a lot of lines like this: *** glibc detected *** free(): invalid pointer: 0xbff99990 *** ...but it works …

DOSBox 0.65 under Debian unstable has been broken like this for a long time now. Here's the backtrace: #0 0xb7b12947 in raise () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6 #1 0xb7b140c9 in abort () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6 #2 0xb7b47fda in __fsetlocking () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6 #3 0xb7b4f89f in mallopt () from /lib/ …

Here's a crazy idea: since DOSBox is an emulator, can't it "dump" the DOS it's got loaded at a certain moment into a file and restore it later? This would make for some kind of "universal saving" even in games that don't have any kind of saving, at any moment. Which would definitely rock, but then …