I've had a lot of those crashes with the version from Humblebundle, even on a computer with 16GB RAM. I couldn't get through the last boss fight without it crashing halfway through. I then stumbled upon a thread on an Ys forum, talking about a patch to make the game "Large Address Aware". I've applied said patch and could finish the game twice without a single crash.

You need a computer with 64bit OS, at least 3GB RAM and .NET Framework 3.5 or newer installed. Then you can download the LAA tool, attached to the first post on the forum thread here:
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/large-address-aware.112556/

Thanks!

I had the exact same problem, just like in the Humblebundle version.

Sadly the game is not support multi-core or high amount of RAM. However you can limit the process to a single core. I has no problem at all, because I always start the older games like this.

This solution worked wonders for me, I honestly don't think I would have been able to properly finish the game without it, so, thanks a bunch, DoctorGOGgles, +1 to you.

Sadly, though, my girlfriend's PC also runs on 32-bit Windows, as does my own, but the 32-bit workaround ended up creating a whole world of memory issues and errors on her machine, so, if anyone's experiencing this, I think it's worthwhile letting you know of the way to revert the values to the original RAM allocation:

- Do the whole process again (run Command Line using admin priviliges, i.e., Run As Administrator) but type in 'BCDedit/deletevalue IncreaseUserVA' -- without the quotation marks --instead, press Enter and restart your computer. NOTE: if you're running a 64-bit Windows, there's no need to do this, because you never had to do the RAM allocation procedure in the first place -- this is for those of us using 32-bit Windows versions, after we had to go through this process, *and* if we ended up experiencing memory issues.