I have the strangest experience right now trying to get LBA to run correctly. The more I test, the worst things seem to get - bless these old PCs making no sense.

Here's my setup:
IBM PC 330
Pentium 233 MMX CPU
64MB RAM
AWE64 Value
128GB (of which 32GB partitioned) SSD
Windows 98 - booted in DOS mode through boot disk

Here's what I tried so far:
- Under Windows 98 it crashes right before entering the prison.

- Using my standard boot disk (Windows 98 formatted but using IBM DOS 6.3 files for a lower memory foot print) - EMS (set to 4MB) + XMS, etc. - the game runs, I get inside the game, all is well ... until I pick up my ID card and map. Then the game crashes. I see corruption at the bottom. It then automatically reboots my PC. Several tries repeat the exact issue in the exact same location. Google shows someone else had this issue back in 2002 with an AWE32. No solution got posted but someone suggested the sound may likely be the cause.

- I decide to disable all sound: it works now. I can continue but of course I want sound in my game. Music works fine, CD audio does too - but the moment I pick ANY sound card, the game crashes in the exact same spot. Reinstall does nothing.

- I modify my bootdisk to use DOS 7 and DOS 6.22 files to see if the memory managers may be the reason. The game still crashes but now it suddenly starts to crash earlier: the intro shows images with text explaining the story but after loading the speech, it hangs. No text appears.

- I return back to my original boot disk and oddly enough, it still crashes earlier than before.

- appiah4 mentions it may be the game doesn't like 233Mhz so I disable cache - the PC runs WAY slower now but it still crashes

- Then I suddenly think: "well it may not expect 64MB memory" so I use XMSDSK to make a 50MB RAM drive to leave just 15MB free. But nope, still crashes. Maybe the game still knows I have 64MB RAM in total and crashes?

- Since this is a DOS4GW game, I decide to swap out the DOS4GW.EXE with DOS32A. That didn't solve anything either.

- It's not the SSD drive either: I removed the SSD drive, installed the game to the RAMDRIVE using the bootdisk and booted it from the RAMDRIVE and it still crashed.

The AWE64 may be a cause too but I'm not going to swap out that card and I don't know of any different drivers to try. I could try to manually remove the RAM sticks but that's a huge hassle. Maybe I could add a SB16 and see if that works?

Anyone else have an idea what it might be?