I'm not sure how relevant this information will be but it may shed some light on crash problems with MC2.

About a year back or so when MC2 wasnt playable on DosBox I tested running Magic Carpet 2 in several different environments. Two of these were virtual PC applications and one was pure dos environment (6.22) on a Pentium 1 266mhz.

I could never get the game to run in the virtual machines, but it worked on the pentium in pure dos. I did however experience frequent crashes on the pentium. I came to the conclusion it was the hardware, either processor or perhaps the soundcard (was an AWE 64).

Magic Carpet 2 ran perfect for me on my old 486 DX/2 100, not a single crash. (SB 16 at the time if I remember correctly).

From my experiences I believe the majority of crashes in MC2 are hardware related.

Of course DosBox is emulation software so perhaps this information is redundant.

I was thinking that CPU cycles and the sound emulation would have to be the key in these issues (my apologies if this is "well, duh..." obvious or something).

Recently I played MC2 on DosBox CVS v0.66rc3, dynamic core SB16 emulation and I didnt experience any crashes. I didnt get a lot of play testing done (spent about 30mins on first level, 5-10mins on second).

My rig is:

AMD 4800 x2
2gb ocz ram
Asrock Dual-sata2 mb
7900gtx vidcard
SB X-Fi extreme music

PS - Cheers to the DosBox developers, I have been an avid fan for a few years now 😀