Hi all,

First off, I apologize for not reading the FAQs, I'm in the middle of writing a bunch of papers for my exams here and I only took a short time off to try and tinker with D-Fend and DOSBox to try to get this game working. I scanned the titles but didn't see one with immediate relevance. So, apologies if that is a pet peeve on this forum (I know it is on some).

Anyway, here's the deal: I recently got Frontier: Elite 2 from the-underdogs.org on a sudden urge to replay it, and while I was there I noticed there was a new(ish) version called Frontier: First Encounters released in 1995, which is basically a graphically improved version of Elite 2. Elite 2 works fine in DOSBox with my tweaked defaults parameters, but FFE continually crashed after the intro screen (where the game loads the default starting position of your choice), and no matter how much I played with the configuration file for DOSBox, including cycles, EMS and XMS support, resolutions, shader modes, cpu core settings, etc. I absolutely could not get rid of this error:

Exit to error: Pagefault didn't correct page.

Now I haven't worked with DOS since I was a kid, so my knowledge of its more technical side is somewhat limited. However, I know that page faults are usually the result of a fucked up kernel when the OS tries to access a bad memory sector. I searched on Google and all the FFE sites I could find to see if anyone else had this problem or even just what the hell it meant. Nada.

I then downloaded a "hacked" .exe for the program that someone created after reverse-engineering the original executable and that works fine; however, there are a lot of wonky things that go on occasionally especially with object placement and textures that nobody has reported as standard bugs, at least on the scale I'm encountering them. Almost every time I try to land on a planet on autopilot (and sometimes on take-off), I smash into the tarmac which is hovering a good 100m above the terrain. Some cities are also placed out in the ocean, also hovering, without explanation or logical reason.
(Note: this hacked .exe doesn't require DOSBox to run)

Trying to track down fixes for these bugs, I downloaded and installed D-Fend and created a profile for FFE, and used every possible combination of options I could think of to fix it, but I get the same error I got using vanilla DOSBox. This was all done using the original .exe. I haven't made any changes or hex-editing or what not to either of my executables.

That's the end of my long story, thanks for bearing with me. Can anyone tell me the cause of this error or at least have any ideas where to look for a solution? I am reasonably computer literate and if someone can put me on a trail, I'll get the fix sooner or later... but I won't stop until I do. 😀

Thanks in advance for any replies.

I'll post my system specs if necessary, but I'm pretty sure this is a DOSBox-specific error and a DOSBox-specific solution. Suffice to say, I'm running XP/Sp2 on an AMD 2200+ (1.8GHz).