Problems with Hexplore

I've been having trouble getting the game Hexplore to run stably in WinXP. It is an old, rare game made for win95/98 systems, but I didn't think this would be an issue, as I can get nearly all of those older games to work. It's meant to run in 640x480x16.

The game installs, loads up, and appears to run perfectly fine. However, after running for about 1-3 minutes, it invariably pauses for a second and then crashes to desktop (no error message or anything of the sort).

I've tried all of the following without success:
-Changing compatibility settings (including 640x480)
-A CPU slow-downer
-Turning off Direct-X's hardware acceleration
-Changing desktop resolution / color depth before loading.

As such, I'm bum out of ideas, so any thoughts, possibilities or solutions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

 

Which compatibility mode are you running the game in?

 

I tried playing it using all 4 of the options (95,98,NT,2000), but the problem persisted through each of them.

 

Have you tried DOSBox?

You can find it, and info about it, here: http://www.dosbox.com/

 

Yes, I haven't got it to work, but I'm not sure if I tweaked all of the options correctly. Does it really work with some windows 95/98 games? (Also, this game is played partially off the CD)

 

Yep. It is on my WinXP computer (not currently in use) and runs old Win98 games just fine. The DOSBox site has a list of games that work with the emulator, that you can look through. Be sure to test it on a game that should be working just fine.

 

After playing with parameters I can certainly get some games to load up, but Hexplore tells me: "This program cannot be run in DOS mode". Is there a way around this, or is that the end of this particular line?

 

Does anyone know of a good win95, or win98 emulator that isn't hyper-expensive (i.e. not $100-200)?
(Hope i'm not breaking rules, I saw something about emulators at the top of the forum)

 

Nevermind - Problem solved: I found an old Windows 98 Laptop that I had stashed away - Hexplore runs fine on it.

 

I was just about to go on a vast Google search for how to install Win98 in a virtual machine on your system LOL

Congratulations on finding the treasure laptop

 

Thanks! It's kind of weird in a way, because I knew I had it, yet I had totally forgotten about it at the same time, and didn't think to look for it until now. LOL