Welcome to VOGONS adamsons.

It is always nice to welcome someone that actually understands how to read the sticky topics, read the documentation, search the forums, and then also writes a good, clear error report.

When you launch DOSBox, do you get both the main DOSBox window, and the status window? Does it say anything in the status window? It might be, that when DOSBox aborts, the status window also disappears. If you launch DOSBox with the -noconsole option, the status messages will go to a file (stdout.txt and stderr.txt) instead. Might be worth trying that and see if something is written there.

Which CPU core are you using with DOSBox? simple, normal, full, dynamic? See your dosbox.conf file.

Have you tried different output methods (surface, overlay, opengl, ...)?

You wrote "Sound mode used: disabled". Does this mean you have disabled the emulated sound devices in dosbox.conf? Like mpu401=none, sbtype=none, gus=false, pcspeaker=false?

Hello MiniMax,

Thank you so much for the help, it's very frustrating.

I will be honest and say that I have just a base install of DosBox and am using that. I did look at the guides but, I am not hugely PC aware and I didn't wnat to change anything without fully understanding the consequences.

In answer to your questions:

When I launch the program I do get both windows. When I get the error message and kill that, both windows do disappear.

I have just tried the "-noconsole" option and now when the game crashes, I kill the window and it just disappears with no error message. Also, stdout.txt and stderr.txt have no information in them.

I am using "core=normal"

I'm sorry, when I wrote Sound mode disabled, I mean't the game has an option to disable the sound and I selected that. I have left the sound options as default.

Have you tried different output methods (surface, overlay, opengl, ...)? : I could not find this info in the readme?

Apologies for my lameness here - I've literally just installed the program so I am completely new to it.

thanks again for your help.

Have you tried different output methods (surface, overlay, opengl, ...)?

Have a look at dosbox.conf (look for it in the Programs menu).

adamsons wrote:

Have you tried different output methods (surface, overlay, opengl, ...)? : I could not find this info in the readme?

Check out your %ProgramFiles%\DOSBox-0.65 folder (the folder where you installed DOSBox, maybe it is C:\Programs\DOSBox-0.65?). You should have a dosbox.conf filere there. Copy it to dosbox.conf.ORIG, and then open the real dosbox.conf with Notepad and have a look.

Hello again - apologies for the delay in responding, I've been away.

I have tried all the different methods now, opengl, surface, overlay etc and it crashes with all of those....

The game does work for some time and then(as there is more going on) it crashes.....it's like it is running out of memory....

You might want to try doing some tests to see if your system is stable. Civilization is a popular game, so the longer no one comes forward with word that they've reproduced this, the more I would suspect your system -- though maybe it's not necessary to look into this yet.

It might be a good idea to do as much as possible to rule out crashes that occur due to change in power usage (since some components will operate correctly when the power is being supplied normally, but then fail when it gets too bad). You could make sure any power-saving or throttling options set for your notebook are disabled and that you're running from a power adapter. Make sure no USB devices (particularly hungry and/or sporadically guzzling ones) are plugged in, make sure the fans are spinning at a consistent speed (control this if you can, maybe put the notebook in a cool place 😀 -- keeping it cool is a good thing for a test too), make sure you don't have a CD that might spin up and down in the drive, might want to make sure the LCD backlight strength isn't being modified by any power-saving settings and putting it at a dimmer setting may be helpful, or anything else that could affect how the power is being used while running. Maybe you're doing some of this already.

You could also try running some diagnostics (eg. memtest86 for memory) under normal settings to see if you've got a memory problem. Hardware errors can sometimes manifest themselves at strange times (or moreso, it can be strange how many things you can do without seeing any errors.. and then have them pop up fairly reproducibly under particular conditions that don't even seem very demanding).

If the errors keep appearing, you could try underclocking your system for a while to see if the problem remains.

Anyway.. you wouldn't want to run your system like this all the time... Just some suggestions for diagnosing hardware problems in case that is the issue, though I'm not an expert on it (just an occasional victim).

Hello Augnober,

Thank you for tkaing the time to post on my issue, much appreciated.

I have tried to run the application on my home pc which has a much higher specification than my thinkpad - I get the same issue. I think therefore that it is more likely a setting within Dosbox itself that I need to change.

The symptom is very much that the game works for a period of time but as the "world" and data supporting it increases, it reaches a point where the game crashes.

I think I need to look at supplying DOsbox with as much "juice" as I can and see how that works.

Thanks again.

Stewart.

Maybe the problem is specific to your version of civilisation.
I don't know if the version you have is the latest, but there exist patches for that game

Qbix,

That is a really good point...I will investigate.

thanks,

Stewart.

Civ has some severe and well-known errors that happen with high population counts. Most of them are avoided if you DON'T view the civilization score screen. Check out the Civ FAQs on the net for some great information about gameplay, bugs that are actually cheats, bugs that are annoying and the 5(!) different versions ov Civ1 that existed.