I've been running daggerfall under dosbox and everything has worked fine until recently.

For some reason the game locks up, total computer freeze needing a reboot, after playing for a variable amount of time. Sometimes a few minutes on up to a half hour or more of playing. I've even reinstalled the game to a clean hard drive that only has windows xp running on it to try to eliminate background processes interfering with the game. Load the saved game and still have the same problem.

Last quest I was on was to find a crazy mage tucked away in some obscure dungeon. The quest was not completed on time and maybe this could be the issue. I ran the saved game through fixsave 1.75 but no improvement.

Anyone experience a similar issue and know of a fix or work around?

Thanks for any replies.

That sounds more like a DOSbox vs. your computer sort of a problem. Daggerfall itself knows nothing of your computer outside DOSbox. My two questions are, did you update your drivers (espeically graphics) just before this started and are you playing in fullscreen? I've never seen any recent game crash XP while running in a window. They don't usually crash it in fullscreen either, unless your video card crashes, but sometimes it's extremely difficult to alt-tab out when a game locks up.

^
Thanks for the input Aliotroph?. I diagnosed the problem down to a failing power supply. I found this out while running Daggerfall in dosbox on Ubuntu Linux and having the game freeze, or the computer spontaneously rebooting. The rebooting began to happen more frequently regardless of OS. Checked voltages on the power supply and got less than optimal results.

I also have a clean install of the most recent Radeon 9200 graphics drivers from the manufacturer Turns out I also had downloaded drivers during an automatic update in Winblows XP by accident.

The update drivers aren't usually too much of a problem (except on my olde Compaq notebook where any graphics driver update would BSOD Windows if you didn't update teh keyboard driver first).

I would never have guessed the PSU based on the supplied symptoms. hehe Usually when I've seen those things fail they just go all at once and often take the mobo with them. Good to hear you got it fixed.