Weird - i have battle isle 2 running just fine in 0.60. This sounds to me like it may be some kind of anti-priacy measure. Quite a few games used to continue working if they were pirated, but with massively ramped up difficulty (e.g. Moo1, Rogue).

Are you using the CD or the floppy version? If its the CD version then it may be failing to detect the disc and thus treating the game as pirated.

Alternatively, did you install the game from scratch, or was it a zip of a previous installation? Some games used to make a note of things like disk volume and install path, and if that changed then they decided that the game was a pirated copy.

Anti-piracy measures in a game that old? Didn't think of that.
Well, I bought Battle Isle 2 and mission disc "Das Erbe des Titan" on CD, and I also got the floppy version of Battle Isle 2 (without mission disc).

I made a clean new installation, by copying both CDs on my harddrive and mounting them with "-t cdrom". The setup lists the correct drive letter for the emulated drive, and the game can load mission data, that isn't in the game-directory, but can be found on (virtual) CD. This version got that weird error.

I also tried the floppy version, which works correct. Somehow the .exe-file is slightly different to that which came with the CD-version. After replacing the .exe of the CD-version with the .exe of the floppy version it worked, but that doesn't help as the .exe is replaced again, when installing the mission disc.

So that really sounds like some kind of copy protection, activated by it's inability to check the "CD". Any idea what can be done about that?

The problem in BI2 is indeed a copy-protection. you can also see a small message after a few moves at the bottom of the screen.
i've got the same problem, although i've got the original
*flames to bluebyte* 😠
would be nice if anybody has a fix or crack for this game.

According to www.spieleforum.de the CD's label must be "BATTLEISLE2", and the game must be stored in the root directory. Setting the label with
mount d d:\ -t cdrom -usecd 0 -label BATTLEISLE2
didn't help me though. 🙁

did you install the game to root directory ?

e.g.
c:\battle

?

yes i did, of curse.

It finally works.

I just didn't try ioctl with a real cd yet 🙄
With the original cd in drive d: the mount-command is:

mount d: d:\ -t cdrom -ioctl -usecd 0

ah yeah... good news...

I had all the same problems with BI2, but finally reading the proposal about the CDROm mount command , it finally works.
All my thanks to the people who brought me that far.

However, I had tried to run the game w/o using the CDROM at all. I copied the CD contents to my harddrive and then I tried to use the identical cdrom mount commands (-t cdrom -ioctl -usecd 0). Of course that did not work, DOSBOX recognizes that my path to the harddrive is no a CDROM anymore (It seems that ioctl and usecd etc are all CDROM related commands).
I got the game running by just mounting the "CDROM copy" to D:, but then I again ran into that bug where a demon is winning over a tank.

So the problem is: what mount command do I have to use when I want to ruin the game w/o having the CDROM physically in the CDROM-drive.

you would have to make an iso and mount that using demontools or so.
if the game uses features present in a real cdrom drive then you have to have one. (or an emulated one). Dosbox doesn't provide that sort of emulation.(well only in a basic matter)