I'm wondering what you use for memory management, memory in the xms and base memory.
many use himem and emm386 for memory management but qemm is great for 486 in general for dos gaming it is more efficient on lower spec systems.
a memory test would both tell of memory faults and freshen up the banks (flexing their ability).
also scandisk is a good idea.
As for the errors in your screenshot; it looks like a memory allocation issue.
Soundcards in ISA did have a memory issue called the memory hole and is usually catered for in system bios (on or off)
I would generally remove the sound card to see if that improves the situation launching games just to determine the cause.
Also, given your memory size as a last resort perhaps try launching your game in windows 95 as sometimes the kernel can support memory better.
GPU could be changed to an alternative brand as not all support all games. (most don't)

Well I'm dumb. Replaced dos4gw with the 2.01 version and it works fine. Noise crackling is still a really annoying issue in a lot of games. I think it's because I technically have 65mb of ram so dos4gw was having issues with that?

If anyone knows how to fix the awful cracking and beeping though that would be great. I tried using the sb16 mixerset and turning off all of the lines thinking there was some issue there.

I'll make a new post instead of continuing on an unrelated subforum.

Why not use the Windows version of Fallout ?

The DOS version has a lot of issues, on top of being incompatible with a lot of patches...

xcomcmdr wrote on 2021-08-11, 07:05:

Why not use the Windows version of Fallout ?

The DOS version has a lot of issues, on top of being incompatible with a lot of patches...

Because I can 🤣. Why does anyone do anything stupid like this with old dumpster machines.

I just like to tinker around with things that limit me.

Also because I used to play it on a 66 back and the day and wanted to relive those memories a bit. I got everything working though. I just ask questions before finding the solution myself.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2021-08-11, 07:05:

Why not use the Windows version of Fallout ?

The DOS version has a lot of issues, on top of being incompatible with a lot of patches...

Not to say as much, but the windows version of Fo1 and 2 is in dire need of a better higher res patch that unlocks keyboard use for stuff like recording and reshade, and it isn't buggy with the scaling and cinematics.