Have you tried another copy of the game? Maybe this one is corrupted , I can't remember any of these issues and I did spend hours with it back then 😀

I played piles of hot seat Scorched Earth way back when. I remember sequential mode as being an option in game which never really seemed to work well, but never did it glitch the way you describe. Does it do this in Dosbox or just on raw hardware?

If you like Scorched Earth, maybe have a look at Tank Wars as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-rAY1VSVNY

I can't remember those issues either. (I remember passing the game on to a friend once; he decided to open up the options screen and start clicking around randomly and then asked me later why it wasn't working the way he expected. Ahh, memories.)

^^^ Your friend needs to run fix.bat 😉

Raw hardware - I might add that I had it on a 386 for decades now and I seem to remember why I stopped playing it for too long: It acted the way I described. Mind you, I did complain about that particular 386 in previous posts (it's waiting on a motherboard now) but I've run the game off clean copies on both a 386SX/16 and a Pentium 166: Same deal.

Many versions of the game were tried, and download sources as well. I'm going to give the game a shot on a Linux DosBox using the default configuration on a modern computer but as it stands now, I'm playing a 30 round game and I have to save at the end of each level (and wait until the game draws in the map each time - 16MHz of 16-bit bus processing... I remember now how computers used to hone patience, rather than limit it) in case it f**ks up - and it routinely does, every two or three rounds in the same manner I described above.

This is weird - Either there's a 386 hating cloud raining on my old systems in my condo, or I dunno, aliens?

I also played this game heaps and never had the problem you describe? Sounds really odd.

You don't have a maths copro installed in your 386s? I played on a 486SX which obviously doesn't have one, but the game does make use of it if available - the angle/power adjustment is MUCH faster. I remember there was an environment variable to disable it as it was too fast otherwise.

You can turn off firing delay and falling delay to speed it up - Co-processor is on its way from China as we speak, I will be 387 equipped in a short 4-6 weeks.

The thing that's weird is that it performs the same way across platforms. Maybe I have a virus? I've scanned all diskettes and drives with FPROT from 2009 and then with the newest Trend Micro (2016) via an XP machine (with IDE support) and nothing was ever found...

Here's what I mean - First pic, you can see tanks in the air, and a MIRV that didn't explode (shell is still in the middle of the explosion, which goes unchanged for rounds) - In the second pic, you can see I fired a shot (I'm far right, red tank) and the other tanks stay suspended. When the cyan tank (middle top) got shot down, it started to flash, then the computer just made a loud buzzing noise. It didn't freeze, as CTRL-Q brought up the menu, at which point I turned off the sound and selected MASS KILL and walked away. Eventually the round summary showed up.

Any ideas?

http://imgur.com/a/Gnjpy

*edit just now - Was playing it on the 386SX and I got an Abnormal Program termination - Floating point error (divide by 0) and it kicked me out to DOS. WTF? I'm gonna try to boot it clean without anything but a mouse driver... Could it be the mouse driver that's causing this actually?

If you're really puzzled, you can contact Wendell Hicken and ask him about it. His contact info is at the bottom of his Scorched Earth page.
http://www.whicken.com/scorch/index.html

That had crossed my mind on a number of occasions...