I can confirm both the issues you have and found the solution finally while I was messing around with various settings. Both 0.74 and SVN doesn't really like this game unfortunately.

Here's what I found out so far. When you install the game the effects are defaulted to beeper, so you need to change it to SoundBlaster. The game launches immediately after you install the game and probably that's why it worked on the first try. However if you exit DOSBox and launch the game again then it hangs.

So I tried looking in HELPME, but nothing seems to be usable, and this issue could be a design flaw of the game and most likely not a DOSBox bug.

1 SOUND RELATED PROBLEMS
2 ----------------------
3
4 The game supports the ADLIB and SOUND BLASTER standards as well as
5 providing support for the internal speaker. The SOUND BLASTER provides
6 an additional function to allow "DIGITAL voice capability". Any problems
7 that may arise will be mainly to do with this voice capability. Incorrect
8 settings can cause your computer to "lock" up.
9
10 Q. My SOUND BLASTER or Compatible Card does not seem to be recognised by the
11    program.
12
13 A. The program needs to know two important items of information about your
14    sound card before it can operate properly. The game automatically looks
15    for a SOUND BLASTER card using the default settings of these cards. If
16    your card is set up different from this defaults you will need to run
17    the SOUND BLASTER SETUP utility. You may execute this utility by answering
18    YES to the prompt after leaving this document.
19
20 Q. I have the SOUND BLASTER option set but when I am playing the game
21    the program "locks"
22
23 A. Again this means that the SOUND BLASTER may have been detected but
24    the IRQ and BASE IO address settings are still incorrect or there is
25    a conflict with some hardware or software.  Refer to your technical
26    information on your sound card to determine how to find these two
27    numbers. After leaving this program you will be asked if you want to
28    alter these default numbers.
29
30
31    PLEASE DON'T USE IRQ 10, SKUNNY DON'T LIKE IT. YOU WILL NOT HEAR ALL
32    THE SOUNDS IN THE GAME !!
33
34
35    IMPORTANT
36    --------
37
38    This game supports cards that ARE 100% Compatible with the
39    Sound Blaster. If you are sure that the settings are correct and
40    the program still refuses to recognise the card then it is most likely
41    that the card is not 100% compatible!.

Then I tried changing the interrupt and I/O address but that wasn't helpful. Even changing the sbtype in the config file. Oh and by the way you the game doesn't detect these automatically you need to change them manually. You need to run HELPME.EXE and quit it to be able to change the values.

So then I reset everything to default and loadfix-ed the sucker. That seems to work somewhat but I'm getting some weird DMA wrappings in the console with different size values.

1DMA segbound wrapping (read) 0:10000 size 2 [0] wrap ffff

The sound will work now after a bomb hit the ground and you can play until you die. After that only the HUD will shup up and the rest of the screen will be black.

Now here's the fun part. I allocated another 64kb of memory and that fixed every issue we found so far. The trick is to run loadfix two times before you run the game. You can set the cycles to max and that should work I guess. I hope this helps. Unfortunately I can't tell why these issues are happening, maybe someone else will be able to give us some explanations. 😉

excellent detective work. Works great for me now. Thanks for posting that.

Skunny: Lost in Space - sound crashing

The solution given for the other Skunny game you posted about works for this one as well, so you should probably try it with any of the games in the series because they are likely to be built on a common code base.

Running loadfix twice is equivalent to running it once as "loadfix -128". Well, there's actually a small difference due to environment memory blocks, but if the issue is sensitive to such fine-grained changes in load address then you probably don't need large allocations, anyway.

ripsaw8080 wrote:

Running loadfix twice is equivalent to running it once as "loadfix -128". Well, there's actually a small difference due to environment memory blocks, but if the issue is sensitive to such fine-grained changes in load address then you probably don't need large allocations, anyway.

While I was messing around with loadfix I tried the loadfix -128 but that still a partial fix and has the same effect as allocating 64kb. I wanted to suggest that instead after I had success with using loadfix twice, and I found out that it's just not the same. I was unaware of the other loadfix -25 thingy that you posted earlier...

Now we know that almost every singe Copysoft game needs loadfix if SoundBlaster effects are in use. Most likely it works on a real machine. Loadfix saved the day once again in DOSBox!

As I said, there is a small difference in running twice, but if the issue is sensitive to that then a large allocation is probably not needed, as is true in this case. There's also a small difference in running loadix separately and specifying the game executable as a parameter of loadfix, as in the case here.