Master of Magic is notoriously buggy at best of times, but on one system it's reaching a new level of instability and I'm trying to figure out why.

System:
K6-2 350
Tekram P5MVP-A4 running the K6plus patched BIOS from here
64MB PC-100 SDRAM
S3 Trio3D 4MB AGP
Intel Pro/100S PCI Ethernet
GUS Classic (A260, I7, D6, no Ultramid etc.)
AWE64 Gold (A220, I5, D1, H5, P300, E640, T6)
(all these resources reserved for legacy ISA in BIOS)
Yamaha MU50 connected via MIDI to the AWE64
6.4GB Seagate HDD

Previously the system had a single Aztech Waverider32+ and also crashed MOM, so I doubt it's the sound card config. System is completely stable in other games such as OMF2097, Ascendency- and Colonization. 64MB DIMM was tested with Memtest86+ in a different system and passed with 0 errors after 12h of testing.

Software:
MSDOS 7.1 install from unofficial installer
HIMEM, EMM386.exe RAM 4096
Master of Magic 1.31 (vanilla)
Master of Magic 1.41n plus GUS patch (replaces PAS16 option with GUS+Ultramid)

I've copied a known-good-as-it's-going-to-get install from DOSbox (1.31) on a modern PC that will usually let me complete a game without crashing. On the K6-2 it invariably crashes within 15 minutes.

Symptoms:
As far as I can make out, any input can trigger it. When it crashes, the top 1/4 and bottom 1/4 of screen show horizontal dotted artifacts, sound hangs on whatever it was playing and system becomes unresponsive, needing a reboot.

I've tried both installs, I've tried various sound options, including no sound at all. I've loaded savegames from other computers that were stable there. It doesn't seem to make any difference.

Of course a K6-2 350 is significantly faster than MoM was designed for, but I'm not aware of it being a speed-sensitive game.

Anybody have any suggestions?

If I haven't figured anything out by tomorrow I intend to replace the whole motherboard+CPU+RAM+VGA by an i430TX board + P200MMX I have lying around, with a different DIMM (or SIMMs) and some PCI VGA card. Not because I have any reason to suspect the hardware, I just want to rule it out. If it makes a difference, I'll swap in the parts till I find the problem. But it would be quicker if someone could point me in the right direction 😉