yes. that is indeed odd. Especially under linux.
Are those games happen to be CD-rom games ?
and which output mode did you select ?

One thing to consider is that dosbox needs a lot of cpu power and that some heating effect may come into play. (not sure if you had FC3 on the same laptop)

Funny you mention heating, most of the times it crashes the fan is going pretty hard...I would suspect if something were wrong, though, I'd notice it under other games...Half Life 2, Doom 3, Halo, and Jedi Academy all run fine (under Windows)...the more I htink about it the more it might be heating, is there a way to check for that? Usually the first time I play it works for a while but after the first crash if I boot right up it freezes pretty quick

Any thoughts appreciated

They're not CDROM games at all, I don't know what you mean by output mode, and it WAS on the same computer (although I'm testing it on another one as we speak...)

output mode:
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php? … sbox.conf%2Fsdl

I tested it again (same computer) on Fedora Core 3 and Damn Small Linux, as well as Windows XP. The Linux distros crash solid after an average of 30 minutes or so, but Windows did not crash once for five hours. I'm beginning this may be a problem with Linux rather than with DOSBox.

Is it possible that Linux is unable to handle the computer getting very hot so it freezes (no pun intended); this is a laptop so it'll probably be getting a lot hotter than a comparable desktop would. It's also possible that it's because I didn't install the motherboard drivers for Linux (having trouble recompiling Mandrake), but did for windows.

In any case, this probably isn't the fault of DOSBox so thanks for the help and I'll take my problems elsewhere:-)

Chech that your distribution enabled ACPI support and Thermal Throttling. It's quite possible that on windows, your CPU is not running at full speed due to overheating, but on linux the neccessary drivers are not enabled.

Oh, and check that your heat sinks are free of dust. Many laptops have very fine heat sinks that clog quite easily. You'll probably have to open the laptop to reach them.

The fan doesn't seem to work right under Linux (any distro, I tried a few). The rest of ACPI works fine, but even when I look in the /proc directories I can't find the fan device, and it never turns on. It's weird though, because I've done things that easily use as much power as DOSBox (correct me if I'm wrong here) such as recompiling the kernel and it never overheats (although the temp does jump 20 degress C)

tried APM instead of ACPI ?

Well dosbox is heavier.... then compiling a kernel I think
as dosbox also needs a lot of graphic power. So the graphics card and the cpu heating up.

Unless OpenGL-HQ is inolved, graphics power is negligible. Simple hardware scaling doesn't stress today's hardware at all. But different apps indeed have different thermal behaviours. Kernel compile is quite heavy, but there's nothing better (or worse) than an app that runs entirely from memory and utilizes almost every instruction type (integer, fp, mmx/sse) mixed (which means all areas of the CPU build up heat).

Funny thing, I always thought a kernel compile is a good burn-in test, but I will now also use dosbox in when testing a given machine 😉

Been trying to convince myself to put DosBox on my BartPE CD....now I've got a good reason. 😉