The MC games, like many others of the same gen, got partially sponsored by Intel, which is why it pumped the ad at the start of the game and why it had locked levels only available for Pentium owners. I'd say that (though I can't be sure) the "pentium" levels had larger/more complex maps than the normal ones in the second game and little more. DOSBox runs both games better than either of my pentium (75 and 120) machines ever did and both of those had really fast and expensive PCI VGA cards for their time (Number 9 Motion 531 and 771) and DOSBox players aren't graced with the Intel Inside ad (meaning the Pentium ain't being detected in either of the ways so joyfully discussed) so I'd say that pretty much shows the irrelevance of the so called Pentium optimisations or codepaths. I mean seriously, even early MMX 'optimised' products did little to actually accelerate the experience...some perspective helps.

My guess would be that the Pentium logo would show right before or after the Bullfrog logo when you first load up the game.

MC 1 and 2 play fine on DOSBox. I know, I've played them both almost to completion. I play MC2 exclusively in SVGA and have seen not a single crash. I use YHKWONG's CVS - second to latest release.

Well, I tried that build and the crash occured just as fast. Illegal reads, freeze, text overlay.... Same as before.

Funny, I haven't had one crash at all in MC2. The first time I played it, I did so through 5 levels and the subsequent plays were varying in length. At no time did I experience errors of any kind, even when using the Munt MT32 emulation layer built into the CVS build I mentioned. Recently, after the purchase of an MT32 I played the game some more with it in use instead of the Munt driver, still not a crash. Sampled Sound has always been set as SB Pro.

For me the game seems to last in high-res mode for 10-15 minutes if you stay in the same level. Playing too long for me may yield crashes during loading of subsequent levels.

However, in probably the entire first half of the game I got little to no crashes. My guess is because the levels are shorter and less resource intensive. Now, on the ending levels (notably, 25 and 23) I always crash - the only way I can beat them is if I play in low-res mode.

upload your save directory as a zip file and I'll try them out at my end.

Thanks! Here is the save directory: