hi, im playing chapter IV and for the second time, the emergency program has started without any apparent reason:
i use DosBox 0.74 and i was playing for a couple of hours.
i built a harbor, made an expedition, and built on the new island.
i have built sawmill and woodcutters, but when the emergency program started, i had no woodcutter left, because the stores were already full of boards and stones.

is it a bug?

Emergency program starts if the basics of continued economy aren't there. If you remove all the woodcutters then yes, you'll get emergency program if you run out of logs and sawmills have nothing to do.

well, your affirmation is not completely true. in my case e.p. started NOT when i dismantled the last woodcutter, but exactly when i built the first farm.. why? i dont know, but just try it.
in any case, im very happy about this bug, because i verified that it happens even playing straight on winxp, so dosbox is not guilty..

I wouldn't call it a bug really. You are supposed to have a woodcutter at all times. I don't know the exact code, but I think these rules are used for the basis of it triggering:

1) you have no woodcutters -> emergency program
2) you have no sawmill -> emergency program
3) you are running out of stones and there is no granite mine or stonemason -> emergency program

Also, the emergency program won't trigger immediately you destroy your last woodcutter. It probably only happens when boards and/or stones are started to be transported to a building zone.

I think the rules for emergency program are explained in one of the text files that comes with the game, or in patch notes. Can't check right now.

The emergency program does NOT start when you have no woodcutters/sawmills. It starts only when you don't have them and you have barely enough resources to build them. It's not affected by stone mason, since building a stonemason requires only wood, and barracks (needed for exapnsion for stone) only need wood as well.

So after dismantling woodcutters/sawmills the program will not start if you still have lots of wood. But as soon as you build a farm, you use up some of the wood, and if that causes the limit to be reached, the program will start.

(PS. from your first post I see you had a lot of wood. It could be a case of it being on different islands then...)

Depends also on what is meant by "wood". Logs are a requirement, running out of them will trigger emergency program. You can have 30000 Boards, but if you run out of Logs and have no Woodcutter you'll get an emergency program.

The same works the other way around. You can have a lot of Logs, but if you have no Woodcutter and all Boards Sawmills produce are instantly consumed then you'll hit emergency program again.

I guess one could verify the limits simply by changing the DATA\MISSIONS\MIS_0000.RTX and changing the amount of Logs and Boards so that one easily hits the emergency program. Some Boards are always needed to build a Sawmill, so you need at least two Boards to build a Sawmill first before building anything else. I don't have time to test this though. My guess is !SET_WARE 0 ## is for Logs and !SET_WARE 1 ## is for Boards (## = any number from 0 to 255).

Alternatively a savegame editor can be tried. Those should theoratically allow up to some 60000 of each item.