As the title says, the game is consistently crashing whenever I try to start up on what I think is my sixth level in the game. This seems odd, since the game was very stable up to this point. I'm playing the DOS version since DOSBox lets me remap the controls. When I attempt to start it, I get a black screen with some text and an odd sound playing for a moment, then I'm back at my desktop. I reset my PC to make sure it didn't just need a restart, but the same thing still happens. I also started up a new game to see if it would crash there as well. It did start up with the same black screen and sound (which hasn't happened until now), but I still ended up making it to the first playable part of the game that way.

I've done some searching, but haven't found a solution. I found one suggestion to change the cycles from auto to 50000 but that didn't seem to do anything. I apologize if this issue has been brought up a lot here. I've been dealing with lots of game-related issues this past week (XWA, Rogue Squadron, and X3) and I'm honestly worn out from all of the searches and failed attempts to fix them. So I just want to ask outright if anybody knows a solution to this?

I've attached a screenshot of what it displays before the crash.

Specs just in case any of this matters:

Windows 10 64-bit
i5-4570k 3.40GHz Quad Core
8GB RAM
GeForce GTX 970

In the dosbox configuration file change fullscreen resolution to you native screen one, aspect to true and render to openglnb.

Tried but it hasn't stopped it from crashing when trying to start the mission. Thanks though.

Wait, I looked at the attached jpeg and perhaps I know what it is.
I rememer some time ago that there have been problems with a damaged music.tre file with the GOg DOS version, they had a fix for it in one of the other topics here IIRC.

Sorry for necroing, but maybe someone still has trouble with this, like I did. I think it could be more of a file naming issue than file corruption. There are only four music files on the original discs. CD 2 and 3 have music2.tre, 4 and 5 have music3, and 6 has music4. So maybe its just a question of identifying which of the files in the game directory are the actual music2, 3 and so on. I'll experiment with it in the near future.

If its starting with mission 6 or 7, I've not seen this issue with the default GOG Windows version. So, there's a simple solution.

Not sure what it would be with the DOS version but it could even be DosBox itself in theory, maybe is too incompatible today, or needs its own special fix like it can't find the file from path issues. If you're using Win95/98 compat settings (or even anyway because its a Dos game) a path/perm issue can be seen there with games so I'd probably try installing or moving the game at C:\wc4 and see if it helps.

Can bind new controls anyway using a keybinding application so that's not much of a reason itself to use the Dos version.