My system info :

OS Name Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Home Premium
Version 6.0.6001 Service Pack 1 Build 6001
System Type x64-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6750 @ 2.66GHz, 2666 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date Phoenix Technologies, LTD ASUS P5N-E SLI ACPI BIOS Revision 0803, 26/12/2007
SMBIOS Version 2.4
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 2.00 GB
Total Physical Memory 2.00 GB
Available Physical Memory 1.10 GB
Total Virtual Memory 4.23 GB
Available Virtual Memory 3.12 GB
Page File Space 2.29 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

Dosbox version = 0.72

Trying to play : King's Quest VI International Version MS-DOS 3.5" HD VGA and EGA (copyright 1992)

I've had 2 problems with this game, one I solved, one I haven't :

Problem 1) (I solved this one) The game came with 9 x 3.5" floppy disks and I have played it successfully many times on an old Win 98SE pc which I could boot into DOS. I tried to install it using dosbox (on my vista pc) and it went well until I got to the last floppy disk. I had an error saying that files a : * . * (had to put extra spaces in or a smiley appears instead of the intended text!) could not be copied and the install process exited. I could not access the a:\ drive (from within dosbox) after this until I restarted dosbox and re-mounted the drive. I copied the files manually, but my floppy drive seemed to be churning away making lots of noise and I thought perhaps the 9th floppy disk was now damaged. I tried to run the game anyway, and it said that for the first run of the game some files had to be un-compressed. The uncompress utility started but did nothing.

Luckily my old pc still works, so I installed it and un-compressed the files on that successfully (the 9th floppy worked fine on the old pc), transferred the game to flash drive, then to my vista pc and it works fine for a while.

Problem 2) The game works for quite a while then exits with an "Out of handles" error. From my vague memories of dos I wondered if I could put a "FILES=" statement in the autoexec area of dosbox.conf (right at the end of the file) and also wondered what would be a sensible value if it is a good idea.