I have not had much success with any of the Goblins games with DOSBox, but all three work perfectly with VDMS, if you use SAPUCDEX.

I had the European release of Gobliiins from Coktel Vision I think and it worked fine for me under Dosbox .61. I don't know what changes were in the Sierra version when it was released in the US. I didn't have any trouble loading Goblins 2 or 3 from Sierra but haven't played them past the initial scene in Dosbox yet. My config is nothing fancy, CPU cycles set to 14000 and no frame skip, everything else was at the default.

No problem at all with my copy of Gobliins 1 and dosbox 0.61, no extra config (5000 cycles, no frameskip, ems and xms do not matter, ...). Maybe there's a problem with your copy?

(gobliins readme file says version 1.000 9/11/92 DOS)

That's really weird, I'm running the European release as well, its the CD version which has both Gobliiins and Gobliins 2. My version data says 1.02->.
Um, this may have something to do with it... The dosbox console gives me a warning: file creation failed: D:\$$$.$$$ at the beginning of the installer.
Here's hoping I'm being a really stupid newb and this is an easily solved issue.

is D your cdrom drive ?

Yep, D:\ is mounted to D.

well no wonder file creation failes 😀 (a cdrom is read-only)
try copying the files to hardrive or installing the game or so ?

Heh, well, I tried installing from a folder on my hard drive, and it asked for the CD, so I guess it must be something weird left over from the floppy disk version.
I tried just running it under VDMS a few minutes ago, and I get Unknown Error -100. So perhaps it just is my version that's weird... Anyone know a site where i might be able to d/l a copy with an earlier version..?

Install it from the CD to your harddrive. It checks for the CD. You will have to mount both your CD (with -t cdrom) and the install folder.

Yeah, that's what I've been doing previously. The game appears to install ok, but regardless, something apparently tries to write to the CD in the process. Either way, it still just hits a black screen when trying to actually run the game.

Try copying the entire cd content to a folder in your hard disk, and then mount this folder as the cd rom... That was how i got Pinball Dreams Deluxe running on DoxBox(the same as your problem was happening)

Cheers DOS_boy, that's sorted out the file creation error. But the actual running of the game is still not happening... Maybe there's something weird about my whole machine, I should try running a bunch of other games...

Gobliins Demo worked fine for me but i dont know if they actually speak wierd? do they?

Heh, yea, they're supposed to speak like that. Well, for the most part, anyways...