it would help if you described what happens when you try to run it in DOSBox...
(along with the relevant config options and system specs)

Yperhaps it is made for ntvdm and not dos

It simply doesn't work. I get a blank screen.

I use the default parameters

My computer is a laptop, a AMD Phenom II P840 Triple-Core Processor with 4 GB of RAM and uses as a graphic chipset, an AMD M880G with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250.

But I doubt that it's my configuration file or my computer. Anyone who tried it on DOSBox said that it failed.

Forgive my noob moment, but I'm not sure that you mean by ntvdm.

If you mean Windows NT, well no. The game was made for DOS (and was also supposed to work on Windows 95/98.

I've just downloaded it - I presume you cd to the 'exe' directory and run gamby.exe?

On doing that the dosbox window terminates and I see an error in the launching shell:

1$ dosbox
2DOSBox version 0.74
3Copyright 2002-2010 DOSBox Team, published under GNU GPL.
4---
5CONFIG:Loading primary settings from config file /home/megatron/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf
6MIXER:Got different values from SDL: freq 44100, blocksize 940
7ALSA:Can't subscribe to MIDI port (65:0) nor (17:0)
8MIDI:Opened device:oss
9ALSA lib pcm.c:7223:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occured
10DOSBox switched to max cycles, because of the setting: cycles=auto. If the game runs too fast try a fixed cycles amount in DOSBox's options.
11terminate called after throwing an instance of 'char*'
12Aborted

Here's the output of strace when attempting the above.

At least one of the errors seems to be that it appears to be looking for C:\GAMBYS\EXE\DIRS.XXX, I don't know if that is what causes Dosbox to terminate though. It seems unlikely.

In fact, the download is an image of the CD. I made an ISO and installed it through DOSBox.

Ok. The file 'DIRS.XXX' is in the folder 'FILES'. Place GAMBY.EXE in the same folder as those and you get the following after a DOS4GW prompt: "Game CD not in drive or bad installation".

BTW, how did you install it? The INSTALL.EXE file claims "This game cannot be installed" when I run it.

Strange. After mounting the iso and a directory as my C:\ (like I usually do), the game installed like a charm. It just doesn't run.

Yep. Tried again with it mounted as a fake cd image and it's installing....

Now I see what you mean. I appears to run, as you see the univbe nagware banner and then can hear the sound hardware pop into life, but the output is completely black.

Probably an unsupported video mode / video trickery then. According to the link in the OP, "at the time it became the first or one of the first games to display 65.000 colors on screen" so it might have done that in a way that DOSBox doesn't support.

seems like at least one VESA-related patch has been applied since 0.74, though, so maybe a more recent SVN build would work?

Seems have some problem with an LFB or video memory paging, not sure which. I'm able to hack it into running by skipping past a couple of LFB/page clears (storing 0x20000 dwords) that cause an immediate crash, but it then has slightly messed graphics during gameplay.

it's expecting exception #13 to occur during the move as a trigger for page swapping, same trick as Into the Shadows, but the segment limit is not checked so the exception never occurs.
it will need the same kind of paging patch to make it work properly.

If you're running the SVN version of DOSBox, there's now a patch available from my site that allows the game to run.

using core=normal, the patch works for v0.74, too.

Howdy, I'm the author of the videos of the GAMBYS walkthrough at YouTube and the one who figured out how to boot the game with Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 program. A Canadian YouTube user contacted me recently informing me about the creation of this thread (I presume it is POLE). I would love to see this game working 100% in DOSBox anyday. 😀

I've tried to boot again the game in the DOSBox with the patch mentioned in this topic but this time it was complaining about a missing CD, when I had actually a mounted image of the game as a CD. I don't know if using the real disc solves the problem.

Haruka wrote:

..but this time it was complaining about a missing CD, when I had actually a mounted image of the game as a CD.

Works just fine here, please post your mountings and show what the contents of the virtual CD and virtual C: drive looks like.