I've encountered a nasty game-breaking bug very early in the game:
Shortly after you sit down to have dinner with your family and your father gets upset about your report card, a news report plays on the TV followed by a soda commercial.

The soda commercial crashes the game nearly every time. There's no error message or anything, the game simply hangs and the only way I've found to exit is to force-close DOSBox via the Task Manager. What's strange is that the commercial doesn't always hang at the same time--sometimes it will make it further along before crashing.

I've tried messing around with the cycles in DOSBox, but the crashing seems to be completely unrelated to that. I also Googled the problem and found two or three other people (on other forums) who experienced the same exact thing; however, I've yet to see anyone post a single solution.

So has anyone managed to figure this out? Are there any solutions at all?

P.S. I'd like to add that this MAY also happen with the "disk version" of the game. I've only tested the CD version thus far.

I am having the same issue.

I'm having the same issue here with the CD version of the game. It consistently crashes at the commercial, though never quite at the same spot. I tried tweaking DOSBox to use different settings (like switching to OpenGL) but it hasn't seemed to make any difference.

EDIT: Ok, I managed to get around this freeze. In the dosbox_willy.conf file I changed the parameter waitonerror to false instead of true (which is the default). After I did this the commercial played through without freezing! I guess there was some kind of error during this section so DOSBox was waiting (for what I'm not sure - I can't imagine why this would be the default setting).

Thanks, just1nw!