Bump,

Dosbox 0.65 still has this issue 🙁

Game also seems to hang whenever you press the red sphere near the dolphin (Seems to be ARK entrance).

Game works totally fine on Windows 98 command console...

OK, scratch my last comment, I got it to BSOD my 98 and freeze 😀

Apparently the problem is that the game can't write to the drive.

After setup only a blood.bat is created, but when you click the orange circle near the dolphin (some sort of way to shuttle to planets), the game wants to copy about 5mb of data to the HD.

This fails and the game hangs...

If I use the files that were created from the Win98 console run, the game continues to play fine under dosbox (assuming no new files need to be copied of course...)

Interresting.
Could you run the crashing variant in DOSBox debug and save the output ?

(download the debug variant. Create a configfile. Look for the log= line
set that to some file (log=c:\dosbox.log))
run the game
and attach the log here.

Apparently it gets more interesting.

Going for the debug dosbox, I was too lazy to run the install from a windows console and opted to create an empty BLOOD.BAT file instead (figuring that if the installer could save to the batch file created by windows, it will also save to an empty one).

And lo and behold! All files copied themselves fine on the first run of the game...

Apparently, when the file was created with windows and then altered in dosbox the path to the game folder wasn't in capital letters, which got the game to die...

Attached is a zip containing both good and bad batch files, as well as the logs of running the game through each one of them as well as the results of running the install (which is what caused all these problems in the first place 😉 )