MOO 2 was working fine until I recently booted it up for the first time in a month or two. Now it gets to the black and white logo screen and crashes saying: "DOSBox has encountered a problem and needs to close".

I've reinstalled twice, once over the top and once by removing the whole thing manually to no avail. Any ideas?

P.S. I'm running under XP and MOO 1 works perfectly.

- Try changing the rendering method to 'surface.'
- Dosbox may be trying to render in a resolution your monitor can't handle. Try running the game in a window.
- install the game to a different directory that you have write access to. Dosbox may be running into Windows UAC.

If the above make no sense to you, I suggest you check out http://dosbox.com/wiki/Dosbox.conf. It's a reference on the dosbox.conf file, the configuration file that Dosbox uses. This is good stuff to know, especially the scaling algorithms, which can really pretty up things.

Windows XP doesn't have UAC but the other 2 suggestions are good.
You could also download the latest version of Dosbox from http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1
and see if using the latest version (0.74 when I'm writing this) solves your problem. The MOO1+2 package from GoG uses Dosbox 0.73 which has given me some trouble in the past. Dosbox 0.74 works better for me.

How about this: I'm going to zip up the configured version of DOSBox that I use with MoO2, latest version. All you need to do is extract it to a directory inside of your MoO2 folder, and run dosbox.exe. It should launch moo2 and run just fine.

Note that it is configured to run in a directory inside your moo2 install. Put it anywhere else, and it'll just run and quit.

Download link is here: http://www.mediafire.com/?nqtzz0ggtlqy9gk

And it's all safe, but I bear no responsibility if your machine explodes anyway.

Note: This zip file contains only files edited or created by me, or otherwise downloaded from dosbox.org. It does not contain any IP from MoO2 or anything else.

I've tried all the above now (thanks for the DL), and tinkered with the settings a bit myself, however it is still doing the same thing.

I can't think of anything that has changed since MOO2 was last working that could have caused this.

I'm having something pretty similar, but it doesn't even get to a title or logo screen. WinXP Pro, I tried setting dosbox to run in a window, tried using dosbox 0.74 instead of 0.73, still crashing on load. In a window, the window expands vertically just before the crash, as if it's trying to set a resolution.

Download the latest drivers for your video card and sound card if you haven't already done so.

Sometimes the graphics card has issues with a 3x4 resolution on a wide screen monitor.

Look at the dosboxMOO2.conf file and look for the line "fullscreen=true" change this to "fullscreen=false" and see if you still have problems.
Changing "fullresolution=original" to "fullresolution=640x480" might also help

I had the same issue, it worked fine on my Windows 7 system but crashed on startup on my XP system. This fixed it, thank you!

The change was in dosboxMOO2.conf, changing "output=overlay" to "output=ddraw".

Thanks again!