At the risk of being redundant, how did you mount the image?

Does it work if you mount it with Daemon Tools and then mount the virtual CD-ROM in DOSBox with -ioctl and so on? (Is that actually supposed to work any differently from imgmount?)

I mounted directly with imgmount:
imgmount d .\games\JohnnyBa\cd\JohnnyB.cue -t cdrom

Also tried the clonecd version by using:
imgmount d .\games\JohnnyBa\cd\JohnnyB.img -t cdrom

Same issue with both of them. I have not tried mounting it using a separate virtual drive first as I much prefer to have games mounted directly in dosbox.

Ok, I tried it just to see what would happen.

Interestingly, it does the exact same thing, and after about 10 second of scrolling that error code above, the virtual cd actually unmounts. I tried it with both daemon and magiciso and in both cases the drive unmounted itself after the debug starting scrolling the error message.

If I had to take a wild guess, perhaps it is trying to eject the disc because it fails a copy protection check?

Possibly, but if so then it is an mscdex emulation issue with dosbox, as the image is exact.

But I doubt that is the issue, as the debug log is just scrolling the same line repeatedly. There is no hint that it is deciding to stop and eject the disc.

The game wants to see a busy status reported for the cdrom drive, and it's prepared to wait forever for that to happen. While it's waiting, it periodically issues an init command, but I don't know if that should cause the busy status. Something that may or may not be relevant is that the game is intended to run off the cdrom without installation, so file access and playing audio tend to conflict under those conditions. As it is now, DOSBox will only report the busy status when the drive is playing audio. The "wait for busy" loop is bypassed when the device status parameters indicate raw reading is not supported and prefetch requests are supported, but I'm not confident that exploiting the exception would be a good workaround.

A simple workaround for the time being is to start an audio track playing before running the game. The freeware TRKPLAY utility works nicely for displaying a track listing and playing tracks from the command line.

it might be that expects that reading a file from the CD drive, would cause the drive to be busy ?

Very clever work around ripsaw. I used track 8 as it has a quiet intro, and when set back to back w/ the launch, no actual audio is heard before the game kicks in. Thanks so much for figuring this out.

You can start it without issues if u install freedos/dos6.22 in dosbox. It works well then.

Why are you dredging up a two and a half year old post? Necroposting is frowned upon here.