I think there's some timing issue; but I was able to get past the level screen by increasing cycles with ctrl-f12 and then decreasing afterwards with ctrl-f11 (because the game itself needs lower cycles than it takes to get past the level screen).

Thanks for the reply, but I already tried increasing and decreasing by 50 between the values of 100-500...No luck.

Also, some other interesting results when setting the machine type to something besides cga:

tandy = Black and white screen freezing at the "Level 1" flashing.

pcjr = Full color graphics but freezes at the last set of credits displayed at the title screen

Bump it up to around 1500 cycles and it should move past that screen, it does for me.

1500 cycles worked, thanks for the advice. Even 1000 cycles worked. This is a nice workaround until the problem is fixed. Hopefully it can be looked at and the machine/video emulation corrected so you don't have to start with such a high cycle count for the game, only to have to lower it due to the game being unplayable at such high cycle counts.

There are definitely some strange things which happen respecting this game under DOSBox. For those interested, I'm attaching the different graphic/title screen results based on machine type...

trebor wrote:

There are definitely some strange things which happen respecting this game under DOSBox.

Actually it's not that strange, it's how the game would work on real machines (the only oddity is you don't have choice of monitor type, with CGA you'll get composite monitor emulation, with Tandy you'll get RGB monitor emulation even though both of these could be connected to either monitor type)

The only problem I'm having is with the PCjr version freezing at the title screen. All other modes work ok for me (DOSBox 0.74 on OSX).