I’ve gotten it running on Magic Dosbox pre patches (including restoration patch) but I’m not interested in that version, not that there’s anything wrong with it.
I’ve been knocking down sound quality and I even disabled 3dfx glide support – which I’m not convinced had any positive effect in the first place – over on Dosbox Turbo (on win98) to get it more “playable” with the restoration project while I continue to trial and error Magic Dosbox so that it might also work some day -as again it’s markedly smoother. I can’t tell if it’s an issue with the restoration installation or the windows img or something else; this is why I hesitate to build a win98 img myself because the issue might lie elsewhere. It stops just short of playing the first intro video each time.
It’s weird also that the appearance mod for example in DBT doesn’t show up but that’s not really directly relevant I don’t think.
I’ll try reducing memsize at least and see what happens though. I’m just about out of ideas myself, I’ve got alternate installs coming out of my ears on my PC.
Thanks for the suggestions though everybody. Hopefully this thread hasn’t been a nuisance on the forum.