I too have the same problem in 0.63 - I get to the king screen and it locks up. If I run the game under a standard Windows XP Dos Box, the game runs perfect and gets past this screen without lockup or any problems - minus the sound... We need a working dosbox to fix this... I think it has something to do with how the game addresses video memory etc since this is a very video intensive game, or was for the time. It was one of the first DOS games in VGA to have what I think was 16 levels of Parallax Scrolling - very beautiful to watch and play.

Confirmed.

Anyone try with a recent CVS build?

Tried out Gulikoza's June-30th build. Same results.

When running my own builds (with debugging enabled), I get different results depending on the core selected. On the normal core, I get an "illegal call 7". Other cores give things such as "invalid opcode" or "write to rom". All of that would seem to indicate that either an instruction has been decoded incorrectly or a jump was taken incorrectly, throwing the instructions after it out of whack.

This game resizes segment 0 and expects an error.
Gameplay is fine otherwise.

is this implementable ?(probaly but does it cost speed)

So it does. If I interpret that code (found in VGADRV.OVL) properly, it is the equivalent of the C function realloc, first attempting to resize a memory block and failing that, releasing and reallocating. C's realloc works like malloc if the pointer passed into it is NULL, which appears to be the case here.

Real DOS gives an error when attempting to resize a memory control block that is not part of the chain. DOSBox should do this, too. The current behaviour is particularly nasty (it "resizes" segment 0 [the interrupt vector table] by writing invalid values into segment FFFF [rom area]). I've posted a patch for this on SourceForge.

It should work in the CVS. Will check the patch on sf though.

No need, wd, they're identical except for the error code (yours is correct). Somehow it takes a while for CVS commits to be visible to the general public (one or two days).

It now works with ykhwong's cvs dated 2005-11-08