This appears to be DOSBOX itself crashing. I've seen both, depending on how bizarre the game crash was. Most frequently, DOSBOX remains responsive, although you have to close and restart it. In rare occasions I've had similar problems, where I couldn't even get to the desktop normally, and had to blindly go to Process Explorer (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), blindly find the DOSBOX process by pressing D, and blindly kill it by pressing Del, then Enter. 😀 Not sure how it would work if the standard Windows Task Manager is used instead of Process Explorer. Possibly some key combinations would be different.

Probably the emulated DOS memory gets corrupted and the next allocation/resize/free causes DOSBox to get in a loop that it can't get out off. Ripsaw8080 has improved this behaviour in the SVN.

dr_st wrote:

This appears to be DOSBOX itself crashing. I've seen both, depending on how bizarre the game crash was. Most frequently, DOSBOX remains responsive, although you have to close and restart it. In rare occasions I've had similar problems, where I couldn't even get to the desktop normally, and had to blindly go to Process Explorer (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), blindly find the DOSBOX process by pressing D, and blindly kill it by pressing Del, then Enter. 😀 Not sure how it would work if the standard Windows Task Manager is used instead of Process Explorer. Possibly some key combinations would be different.

Yeah, that was pretty much what I had to do, too. 😵 Good thing for us that we both know how to start process explorer with the right key combination, and navigate to and kill a process with the keyboard. 😢 Well, I had wondered if it was just me, I guess it's not. I don't care for windowed mode as it breaks my immersion, but that's what I'm going to have to do for Darklands. I chased down the SVN version (it sure is dodgy-looking on its download page) but it still locked up. Oh well, at least it wasn't me! 😘

The compatibility list entry for Darklands suggests that some freeze conditions can be avoided by setting xms=false; however, that suggestion was for DOSBox 0.72 and might not be applicable to your problem.

Depending on how exactly the game crashes, it can take down DOSBox, too. There are some emulated instructions that, when passed bad parameters, cause DOSBox to access out-of-bounds memory, for instance.
However, if the game crashes, DOSBox can't really do much about it. If the game crashed on real hardware, you'd have to reboot anyway.