the link to the game is missing 😀

Rather interesting, I can't seem to find download of this anywhere. The company has also disappeared, and the author of the game doesn't have any info on his new site either.

I was almost going to recommend Virtualbox, but then I remembered that getting it to run 98SE smoothly was a pain in the ass, and even then it only runs smoothly in 32-bit color modes for some reason. I've also messed around with Virtual PC 2007, and though it does technically have better support for 98SE out of the box, I found it to be dog slow on the one system I tested it on. YMMV however, because lots of other people have reported success in using it to run 98SE.

Since the game is freeware, maybe you could share it somewhere? It would be easier to get it working if people could try it 😜

My copy isn't the best one to share, since I customized it heavily back in the day (it's supposed to be moddable). I emailed the author to see if he still has an original version somewhere... if that doesn't help I'll try to clean up my copy manually and post it.

For now, just wondering what is the 'best' solution for a game with these requirements. I see quite a few recommendations for VMWare - any second opinions?

Maybe you want to try QEMU.
For Windows, use GOOGLE to search "QEMU WIN32".

Do you have other games that run correctly at 800x600? Does XP itself run correctly at 800x600?

Sound problems can sometimes be resolved by lowering hardware acceleration.

Now this is interesting. Forget what I wrote earlier... it's pretty obvious why the game won't work on XP and above - I guess this should be moved to the DOSBox forums (moderators?)

I took a closer look, and despite what the system requirements say, the executable isn't really a Windows one; it just relies on win9x for DPMI and for long filenames. I created a bootable hd image with MS-DOS 7.10 and LFN support, added CWSDPMI and a mouse driver, and voila, the game runs in DOSBox (SVN).
Still, results aren't perfect:

- with machine=vesa_nolfb - tends to crash; won't go 800x600 (falls back to 640x480).
- with machine=svga_s3 - runnable, but tends to crash sooner or later (more often at 800x600, slightly less at 640x480).
- any other svga machine type - no go, crashes on start.

Other than that, I'm using core=auto, cputype=auto, cycles=max, memsize=48. I tried a lot of variations on these, but none gave me better results (most were worse).

Didn't hear back from the author yet, but here's my copy of the game: http://speedy.sh/GY9YH/StarHavoc-1.1.zip
I cleaned it up as well as I could, but still not sure if it's identical to the original (the game itself says it's v1.1, readme is from v1.2, so go figure). Feel free to try it out... especially if you like Star Control-style space combat, tracker music, and/or particle effects.

Any help with the crashes would be nice, though I guess it's playable enough at 640x480 for now.

When you get page faults with DPMI clients that you suspect were designed to run under Win9x, the problem is often fixed by disabling the DPMI 1.0 extensions because Win9x didn't have them. Run CWSDPMI.EXE (r5 or later) with a -x parameter to make it resident with the extensions disabled.

The other alternative would be HXDPMI from http://www.japheth.de/HX.html#hxdl .

Thanks - tried that but it's still giving me crashes here and there (at the same EIP as before, so I suspect the same cause).
[edit: that was for ripsaw - will give HX a go.]
[edit 2: same goes for HX, unfortunately.]

Oh, and apparently vesa_nolfb isn't any better than svga_s3 after all.

HDPMI has a -m switch to disable the DPMI 1.0 extensions.

You might also try augmenting the hi-color VESA support with S3VBE20 or SDD 5.3a (UniVBE).