For those of you having the crash when the game gets up there in turn numbers, I seem to have fixed it for my dad. If you go into the game's folder, you'll see a called "dosboxMAX1.conf"
Default Path:
C:/Program Files/GOG.com/MAX1 and 2/MAX/dosboxMAX1.conf
Open this file up in notepad, and under the second heading or so, you'll see 'memsize=16'. Changing this to 'memsize=32' seems to have fixed it for us; your results may vary.
memsize=16
change to:
memsize=32
If this works for you, please post here. If not, I'd also like to know about it :)
-Tel

This was one of the first things I tried back in 2007 when I was fiddling around with all kinds of DOSBox settings and it did not work for me at least. But I did not have the GOG version and instead made the changes to the main dosbox.conf file.

Tried that, gave me an extra turn, and then crashed again
gave it 64 MB and got another turn
will try 128MB.... standby for updates...

I jumped straight for 128mb as the setting and so far no problems going over the limit (where before it would crash on me). I will try to get a few more games in to test this.
If we can get a few more to test this out and see how different people fair with it then it could be a good solution to the problem (At least for some uses) and GoG could even patch it into the game - 128mb should be easily usable by most modern computers - older ones being used to run the game might suffer, but I am not sure. IT could be made an optional part with a short macro to control the on/off aspect of it in an out of game menu (for those on older systems who don't want/know how to edit the files themselves)

Maybe we can ask GOG can update their dosbox.conf file?..

I tried this fix and ended up setting it pretty high, 128mb. But I still get crashes around turn 150.

I sure wish gog would fix this, as I'm not savvy enough to attempt the other fixes listed in the forum.

thing is, the memory crash is not the fault of dosbox or gog. back in 1999, when i first played the game on my intel 486, it crashed. and today in 2010 when i play it on my quadcore in a dosbox, it crashes exactly the same way.

i am in turn 114 and it crashes at every beginning of a turn. it is able to autosave before, but this completely kills the fun out of the game.

i still hope i missed something back then and now. there are people who say the game does not crash on them.

Sounds like a memory leak. If it is, would require a bunch of debugging to find.

You can test that - Open Task Manager (ctrl-alt-delete), open the process list. Sort it alphabetically; find DOSBox (at this point, M.A.X. should be running. Check how much memory it's using. If it starts small and suddenly shoots up, it's a memory problem and the most common is a memory leak. Could also be stuck in an allocation loop.

Beyond that - Bug GoG to fix it, I guess. Or hope for/work on an unofficial patch.

when i increase memory size over 16, dosbox crashes. I tried 32 and it crashed. Any clue why?