Yes, I love this game, damn it. That's why I keep posting about it. 😀

The going belief about MC is that it would crash when trying to switch from the play mode to map/spell mode. Yes, that's true; however, I just had it crash while selecting a spell by pressing the associated number key. What's odd, however, is that it does not just abruptly crash. Instead, it actually fades out before it exits. That tells me that MC is being told to quit to DOS. There apparently is something about keypresses (not all of them, however) through DOSbox that Magic Carpet is misinterpreting as a Shift-Q, which is the "Quit To DOS" key sequence.

I'm sure that moving the Quit to DOS function to something other than a Shift-Q would be a definite help to figuring this out. Unfortunately, there is no way that I know of to remap MC's keys to confirm this.

Since my programming skills are UNIX shell and Perl, I'm useless in trying to actually debug this. I hope that what I found here will be a benefit to the developers, though.