Windows 7 64-bit, blaa blaa blaa...

Ok I've made it to the last boss at the end of level 15, at insane difficulty even. The game has been relatively stable up until this point, rarely it may have crashed to the desktop if there has been some spectacular shark missile explosion on the screen or something.

But now as I am trying to fight the last boss which keeps shooting frag missiles at a rapid rate, which cause sparkles on the screen all over, it seems to crash to the desktop quite often. I try to advance in this boss fight bit by bit by saving often and then reloading if the game crashes, but now I have a save game which seems to crash about 10 seconds after I load it.

It seems to me those crashes are indeed related to those frag missiles and their sparkles, they cause the game to crash sometimes, maybe if there are lots of them on the screen. By default the GOG version uses nGlide for 3Dfx graphics, I've tried also the OpenGL and Direct3D renderers but they crash too. I've tried to change some compatibility options for the GOG shortcut but they don't seem to affect the crashes.

Is this a known problem, and are there any workarounds? I tried to google for it (descent 3 last boss crash) but the search results point to a wrong game, some "Descent" DLC apparently for some Assassin's Creed game.

Nevermind, I got past it. It may have been sound related too, it seemed the game would crash as soon as I heard the boss shooting and exploding its frag missiles, but then disabling sound in the options didn't help either...

Anyway, I just stayed away from the boss for awhile so that I didn't even hear it until it calmed down, and only attacked after that. After the boss changed to different weapons (no frag grenades), the game was stable again.

Now to the expansion pack...