I'll assume that you have successfully had blaster sound working on this PC before and can eliminate certain obvious PC issues. I have found that GOG sometimes has some mismatched audio drivers that can cause memory errors. I have the GOG version, but have not taken a look at it. The AUDBLAST.DRV driver from the originals CD has an MD5 of 1AEA52D70881ADD2CF1FD375AF2D65CC. The only other thing that I can think of off hand is a mismatched blaster IRQ, but would think that if this were the case that it would result in a lockup instead of a hunk error. BTW, the interpreter version that the CD version uses does have an IRQ flag for the RESOURCE.CFG -- "audioirq=" to set the game to use 7 or 5.

I'm slowly getting there. Might be a RAM issue.

I transplanted all the cards + storage onto another motherboard and it worked fine there.

I removed 4 sticks and it also worked fine. Then put the 4 sticks back and it froze again.

Will run memtest overnight although I'm sure I did this already 🙁

It's not a software issue as I used this installation for years and it runs fine on the other computers.

I was hoping the error message provides a clue.

The error message indeed hints at memory corruption. It is not necessarily that the memory chips themselves are faulty, it also might be a resident program or device driver corrupting memory. Try running the game with and without using extra memory (as the INSTALL program calls it) and see if that makes a difference.

I pulled out all 8 sticks and put them in another 386 motherboard and the issue moved to the other board 😀

So at least I'm getting somewhere. Memtest didn't find any issues overnight though...

I will test 2 sticks at a time in a 386SX board to see if I can identify the faulty chip at all.

Is there a specific version of memtest that is "better" for 386/486 computers?

And another question. When using "extra memory" the RESOURCE.CFG uses ARM.DRV although there is no such file in the folder.

And in the Steam version of the game is mode=real. What does this refer to?

What are "sticks"? RAM? Why is that called "sticks"?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

And another question. When using "extra memory" the RESOURCE.CFG uses ARM.DRV although there is no such file in the folder.

Doesn't matter. When you choose mouse support, it also mentions STDMOUSE.DRV even though there is no such file either.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

And in the Steam version of the game is mode=real. What does this refer to?

That's for the INSTALL program's boot disk maker. It's not used by the game itself.

Never heard the expression RAM stick?

It's another way for saying SIMM module 😀

None of the SIMM modules threw an error on the 386SX 😵

I'll bag them with a note for future testing...