How much memory are you telling DOSBox to give? You might try lowering it to 8MB just to see what happens.

That's what I did with Ultima 7 part 1 to get it running. It does not help with serpent isle, though. In the old times I used a 486/100 with 8 MB RAM. There it worked well...

Tried with xms=false AND ems=false?
Does it have 0 bytes then, too?

Of course then I only had 635 kB RAM and serpent isle crashed completely (a flow of error messages came down on me and I had to kill dosbox).

The interesting thing is that when I start serpent isle in the first place, I only receive another but changed dos prompt. The C:> seems much lager than normal. At the second try I receive the strange message that I don't have XMS (although mem tells me that I have). If I type in "mem" (instead of serpent) I only get 635 kB of RAM. XMS seems tobe gone. Maybe the program crashes at the first attempt to start it and the XMS support crashes, too?

One solution for Serpent Isle, make sure all the files (including subdirectories) are not write-protected. Files will be write-protected if you copy them directly from a CD.

Yes, this is important. I saw this recently as I started Ultima Underworld. It ran well until I talked to an NPC in the game. Then the first write-attempt of the system revealed that I still had write protection on all files. The game quit wiith an error code. But that's not true with my copy of Serpent Isle. I copied it directly from my old PC onto the new (thereby avoiding installation). Maybe I should try to install serpent isle from my original CD into DOSBOX...

That could help, as it might set some parameters during installation that are specific to the environment you're now trying to run it in.

Reinstallation did not help, too. Maybe Serpent Isle remains the only game of my shelf that doesn't run with DOSBOX...

Hopefully someone else has this game and will try to get it to work, and will either verify your problem or (even better) find a way to get it working.

The game used to work without any problems (I had the version including the data disc). I will check it when I get home.

Mirek

Thanks for trying. I have the complete Ultima 7 edition that's complete with the data disk (Silver Seed). Origin always programmed some games that needed some fine tuning of the system.

Both Ultima 7s work fine in Dosbox, at least for me and some others. I just tried with somewhat current CVS and the 0.63 release for Windows.
Maybe something is badly configured.
Run the install program and set it to not use sound and then try again. If it then works, run the installer again and set it to use sound blaster (IRQ 7).

Finally, I got it running. During installation I received a lot of error messages stating that DOSBOX was unable to create subdirectories, where SI stores the static data and savegames. So I simply copied the program files from my old computer and created the directories manually - and it ran! Afterwards I installed sound and everything works.
Thanks for your support!

Nice to hear that you solved it. Most of the people using DOSBOX probably do not have originalls so they do not have these problems ... Maybe you could send more details (log) about the problem - it is strange that DOSBOX could not create the directories...

Mirek

If you are running Windows I do not advice installing it from within Dosbox. I once tried to install the floppy version and it did work, but it is quite cumbersome and you need to setup floppy support correctly -> pain in..