just tried openglnb and it seems to be fine apart from the screen is off centre (I'm using an lcd screen) so i will have to play it windowed for the time being. Thanks for the help the problem appears to be sorted for the time being. Please leave the Thread open however as I may need to get back to you after an extended test period. Many thanks

just tried dosbox again with openglnb and after 5 mins the problem came back!!! I really don't know what the hell is going on with this.

> I played oblivion the other night for 8 hours solid and no problems

That's a useless comparison because they stress mostly the gfx card,
which is not that important for an emulator like dosbox.

Scan for virii/trojans, check the mb/cpu temperatures when the
odd stuff turns up etc.
Try running dosbox with default settings except for setting
core=dynamic and cycles=2000 (try to keep the cycles as low
as possible for testing). Maybe raise the frameskip. Don't go
fullscreen, and report back if it still behaves odd.

there are no virus or spyware that my software can detect, the temps are fine mobo=36'c and cpu is at 44'c. nothing is oced so everything should be fine. ran 3dmark earlier and everything was fine. which means that it must be OS/Dosbox or drivers as has allready been stated in the thread somewhere.

Did you change/modify dosbox? I'm assuming you're using the version
that worked fine before.
And please try the rest mentioned.

I have not modified dosbox in any way whatsoever (I wouldn't know where to start) I'm using 0.65 at the mo it doesn't happen so often with this one. However all the versions of dosbox i've tried never used to do it but they do now. I'm tempted to say that its a driver issue except that dosbox has worked fine with the drivers i'm using. The only other thing i could suggest is that it is down to D-Fend but again that has always been fine. I'm not sure if there would be much point in changing cpu to dynamic, I've always left that as is and never had any problems. as for the cycles they are left at 3000 it seems to be fine for running nearly every game (if i tinker with the cycles too much the sound tends to distort)

> much point in changing cpu to dynamic

dosbox uses much less cpu power if the dynamic core is enabled.
Anyways, if you got some 2nd harddisk, remove the 1st one,
install the OS on the 2nd one and re-test dosbox. If it still occurs,
replace hardware components one by one, otherwise update/downgrade
drivers (gfx card especially).

why replace the drivers?? Dosbox has been running fine until a couple of days ago, on the drivers I currently have installed. I will see if there are any new updates for the gfx card but I'm not sure if it will have any effect. Also I've managed to narrow down a few things : if I run dosbox with the render set to surface I get the error almost straight away, open gl is the same, but running in openglnb (nb means no borders I presume?) then I am usually fine but some games have large black borders to the left and right of the screen (not sure if that should happen? and I'm using a widescreen lcd monitor so it could be attributed to that).

It's definitely not a problem of dosbox, just the different renderer
stress different things.
And replacing drivers was only the 2nd step. You should definitely
be sure there's no hardware defect.

well I ran 3dmark continuously last night and checked in on it this morning and there was no failure at any level. I'm fairly certain that there are no hardware defects. If there are how can I tell?? Plus my pc is fine when running everything else. All my other games are fine, my digital media editing is fine (v. fast too thanks to dual core 😉 )

Weird that no one else has this issue.

I noticed from your dxdiag that your using Catalyst 6.7. Any reason why your not using the newest ones? I usually wait a month or two to load the latest ones myself.

they were recent a while ago. I usually update within 2 months (and thats at a push) I have haven't updated them recently because to be quite honest it becomes a pain in the arse updating them every three - four days!!! (exagerated I know but come on how often do new drivers come out... They're like new hardware all the bloody time!!!) However I will look on ati page and update and see whats what

Right, I had to reformat the other day (the girlfriend managed to get a load of spyware on the pc and spybot couldn't get rid of it). I use Norton Ghost do all I had to do was reinstall my backup, then I reinstalled dosbox 0.63 and the original version D-Fend (not v2) and its fine! All of the drivers are the same as they were before the reformat the only difference is that at the moment I have no games installed. So I'm wondering if there was a clash with either D-Fend v2 or some of the drivers that are included in some of my other games (such as Starforce drivers). Anyway everything is fine now.