It's using low-level access on the floppy drive, so perhaps mounting an image of the game disk as A: will work; but it's usually done for keydisk copy protection, which is unlikely to work in DOSBox unless it is very simplistic.

Mounting an image bypasses the error I was getting in regards to "drive not active" and allows me to progress to the "new game" screen.

However, at this point it behaves exactly the same as if I was running it directly from the c:\. Upon selecting new game, it dumps out to the prompt.

It tries to verify sectors on the floppy, looking for success in one case and failure in another. DOSBox doesn't support such protection mechanisms (yet), so a workaround is needed to play the game. Run the attached TSR beforehand and the game seems to work from the HD without having to mount a floppy image.

amazing =)