While I was looking MS-DOS games with boss key for the topic posted by sledge I remembered one from the past and wanted to show him but for some reason I found a bug in DOSBox. The game should be Ész-kerék by Babi-Szoft or Babinszki Zoltán, a DOS game inspired by a Hungarian TV quiz show called Kerék-bár very similar to Wheel of Fortune from 80's and early 90's. It was very popular in Hungary and some parts of Romania. I even found a recording from this show from 1992 which you can find here if you are interested.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GfASssaBDg

In the game you will hear a PC speaker version of Glenn Miller - In the mood. It's really catchy but it might get a little bit annoying if you play a lot. Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyxKJD-52Po

For testing I attached the game for you guys. Don't worry the game is freeware and the author encouraged people to pass it along to your friends. Also he even included his address and phone number just in case you happened to like the game and wanted some more stuff. Unfortunately this was the only software he wrote to my knowledge.

The game was programmed on a Hercules card based machine, and that's what the author recommends to use if you run it other machines. It will tell you right away but pretty much it will work with any graphics card.

Screenshot of the game running Hercules mode in DOSBox:

All the keyboard functions are written in the user interface and here's what they mean.

1F1-F10 - Boss key
2ESC - Quit
3ScrollLock - Music
4CapsLock - Sound FX
5Restart game: Ctrl-Home

To crash DOSBox all you need to do is press one of the function keys. Of course I'm using the default config file. The result is that DOSBox will hang. Please note that this happens with 0.74 and the latest SVN. Just launch the game, hit Enter a few times and press the Boss key. Here's what the Status Window will show you:

1Illegal read from 6e624d6e, CS:IP        0:    82a7 
2Illegal read from 6e624d6e, CS:IP        0:    82a7 
3Illegal read from 6e624d6e, CS:IP        0:    82a7 

But I got also similar ones with different addresses too. But this is not all. Sometimes I got a black screen too with nothing in the status window. That's not all. I even got graphical artifacts and even sometimes the screen turns red!

So I ran it in a debugger enabled DOSBox build and here's what I get. It's another Illegal/Unhandled opcode.

1  26997237: FILES:file open command 2 file Esz.Scr
2  29302043: CPU:CPU:GRP5:Illegal Call  7
3  29302043: CPU:Illegal/Unhandled opcode FFFF
4  29311796: IO:Writing 00 to port 1A58
5  29311798: IO:Read from port 1A58
6  29311802: IO:Writing 00 to port 7046
7  29311804: IO:Read from port 7046
8  29311808: IO:Writing 10 to port 0329
9  29311810: IO:Read from port 0329
10  29311814: IO:Writing 10 to port 02A1
11  29311816: IO:Read from port 02A1
12  29311820: IO:Writing 00 to port 00B8
13  29311822: IO:Read from port 00B8
14  29311838: IO:Writing 00 to port 3732
15  29311841: IO:Read from port 3732
16  29311841: IO:Read from port 3733
17  29311842: IO:Writing 00 to port 3733
18Illegal read from 6e6b686e, CS:IP        0:    82a7
19  29311871: IO:Writing 5C to port 3130
20  29311906: CPU:Illegal/Unhandled opcode 63
21Illegal read from 6e6b686e, CS:IP        0:    82a7
22  29319040: IO:Writing 00 to port 8553
23  29319040: IO:Writing 00 to port 8554
24  29319041: IO:Read from port 8553
25  29319057: CPU:Illegal/Unhandled opcode 63
26Illegal read from 6e6b686e, CS:IP        0:    82a7
27  29326208: CPU:Illegal/Unhandled opcode 63
28Illegal read from 6e6b686e, CS:IP        0:    82a7
29  29333359: CPU:Illegal/Unhandled opcode 63
30Illegal read from 6e6b686e, CS:IP        0:    82a7

Now here's the catch... if I set the machine type to hercules, cga, tandy or pcjr the Boss key works just fine. It will show you a C:\> prompt on you bottom of the screen. If you wait on the Boss screen the ASCII smiley face will show up letting you know that the game is in the background. All the rest seems to be broken. I tried ega and almost 90% of the screen was messed up. I couldn't reproduce that but I got a similar one caught on screenshot.

I checked the EXE with a hex editor and found some references to Borland BGI drivers, so it was compiled with one of Borland's compiler.

1BGI Stroked Font V1.1 - Jun 5, 1989
2Copyright (c) 1987,1988 Borland International
3
4BGI Device Driver (CGA) 2.00 - Mar 21 1988
5Copyright (c) 1987,1988 Borland International
6
7BGI Device Driver (EGAVGA) 2.00 - Mar 21 1988
8Copyright (c) 1987,1988 Borland International
9
10BGI Device Driver (HERC) 2.00 - Mar 21 1988
11Copyright (c) 1987,1988 Borland International
12
13Portions Copyright (c) 1983,90 Borland

I'm 100% sure the game is not corrupted. While I was checking the EXE I found some references that pretty much tell you that the file has been tampered or modified by viruses. Now here's another interesting thing. For instance if I modify let's say a character from the strings it doesn't show me those messages, except that the program found the little devil inside itself. Now I get what that message was for after you started the game. So the game pretty much checks itself on every game launch. The only problem is that DOSBox hangs no matter if I set machine type to hercules in the config file.

Any ideas what is going on? If you need something translated feel free to ask and I will help as much as I can. Something is really wrong here... 😢