So on my old 5170, with 1/11/1984 BIOS and a 6mhz CPU, I was able to reproduce the problem. I booted up to DOS 6.22, installed the program, and when I ran it, it asked for the disk. I only have 5 1/4" drives installed currently, and I tried with both the 1.2MB drive and also the 360K drive, and the system locks up solid when trying to access the disk.
The system isn't completely stock, at the moment. It has an aftermarket IDE/floppy controller and also and aftermarket EGA card. That led me to believe that it wasn't an issue with the IBM controller. So I figured I'd try a newer, non-IBM BIOS to see if that would help. I installed the Phoenix BIOS shown at the bottom of this
page. That SEEMED to fix the problem. I booted up and ran the software, and after a few seconds of scanning the floppy, the game started. Great, so it must be BIOS, right? Well, not exactly. I had to pull out a memory card to be able to reach the BIOS sockets. Since the memory configuration changed, the new BIOS setup detected just 640K, and because of that himem.sys wouldn't load. I put the memory card back in, and setup detected the correct amount of RAM (or maybe it remembered it from before). This time when it booted up, himem loaded, and once again the game wouldn't start. With the new BIOS, it doesn't seem to lock up hard, you can still soft reboot it, but the game never loads, the floppy light just stays on.
It seems that the game doesn't like high memory or perhaps himem.sys
I left all of the hardware installed, but just pressed F5 while booting, and the game will still run. I put the IBM chips back in, pressed F5 while booting, and the game still runs.
@robbo007 is your 5170 loading himem.sys? If so, can you try bypassing it when booting up?
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