Yea... that's a real title.... A very oddly built one at that.

I'm running 0.74, however I have tested with an SVN build from last month as well as the DAUM build.

My setup is dosbox with Windows 3.1 & Video for Windows 1.1e. The game does not use quicktime, win32s, or wing. I'm also using the recommend drivers for soundblaster and video as provided on the win3x page. The setup works for most windows 3.x games I throw at it.

In the case of this game, upon install, the user has several icons. Each icon loads a different chapter of the game. All of the chapters have a common problem in that the first sound file plays fine. However, if the user clicks and interrupts the sound file or the game loads the next page before the sound file has completely finished, then sound no longer runs for the rest of the session.

It also eventually locks up. I believe it is waiting for the sound to finish playing before moving to the next scene. So once the sound breaks, it never detects the end of the next sound, so the game can not progress.

In cases where games act wonky in my dosbox/w3x setup, I generally switch to booting off a virtual image with MS-DOS and W3x installed. In this case I end up with the exact same error when I run it there as I do when I run it in vanilla\SVN dosbox.

I then ran the debug version with a logfile to attempt and see if it was something obvious, like an inability to find a file or something that might be useful. As soon as the game starts however, the logfile starts streaming pagefaults. Then it crashes back to the desktop (crash meaning, dosbox closes itself). 5093 pagefaults to be exact:
3242167: PAGING:PageFault at 80000FFD type [2] queue 5093

Overall the game seems poorly coded, so I'm sure that is the main problem. That said, I still wanted to write up the issue in case someone with more knowledge than I is interested in looking into it.