(Note: I am not absolutely sure this is a game issue, as this is the only DOS game I run under DOSBox. I tried searching the forum and got 2700 threads, the first ten of which had nothing to do with anything in my search; I did not bother to read more, since none of the other titles looked promising.)

Several years ago, I installed DOSBox 0.72 on my Win 7 Dell Computer to try to play Lion. I have the original cd and am/was using that. The game not only ran, but ran better under DOSBox than it had originally run under DOS, where it was horribly prone to sound-related crashes. I played it intermittently for months, than there was at least a 6-8 month period where I didn't play. The problem is that now, the actual game won't run, because one of the CD files will not 'open in write mode'. I get the intro and menus, but no game.

The procedure:
Put in CD.
Open DOSBox; input the following (responses in parentheses):
mount c c:\oldgames
(Drive C is mounted as local directory c:\oldgames\)
mount e e:\ -tcdrom
(Drive E is mounted as local directory e:\)
c:
cd\oldgames\lion
lion [exe command to start game]

(splash screen, opening video, main menu screen)

Here I select scenario, simulation or load saved game, and go through the appropriate subscreens until the actual scenario/sim starts . . . except what happens now is instead of my lion appearing on the Serengeti, I crash back to DOSBox with the message "E:\LION\PGNEW.WRL not found"

The DOSBox status window adds the message: "Warning: file e:\LION\PGNEW.WRL exists and failed to open in write mode. Please Remove write-protection." Since this is a CD-ROM, there is no write protection to remove. I did try opening the CD in windows and trying to turn off the file's Read-only Attribute, but that only gets me an error message.

What I have tried:
Internet search seems to show this problem with downloaded games and the usual suggestions are turn off Read-only, or redownload the game. I can't do the first, and the second doesn't apply.

reinstall DOSBox - I now have version 0.74 and it does exactly the same thing

reinstall Lion - I now have two installed copies of the game, and both have the same error

copy PGNEW.WRL to the lion subdirectory on C. I didn't expect this to work, and it didn't.

What really puzzles me is that the game DID work for months, and since I didn't change anything, I've no clue where to go from here. (It has been suggested that a Win7 update may have altered something, which is possible, but other than that I don't think I've added any software except virus updates). One thing I do notice is that I think the response to mounting the E: drive has changed; I think it used to say something about it being a CD-ROM drive, but it's been so long since I played I don't recall for sure. I wrote the commands down on a slip of paper in the CD case, so I'm am certain I'm using the same commands as before.

Any advice would be appreciated.