Every time I try and play BiA, and hit New and make difficulty choices, the opening sequence starts and it crashes at the EXACT same spot in the sequence every time (just after the narrator says something about being pursued by something out of a nightmare. Tried skipping it, and when the Chapter 1 sequence plays, it crashes at THE EXACT SAME spot every time too.

Here's what I tried:
Switching two lines in the RESOURCE.WIN file regarding cache size from 6000 and 1000 to 600 and 100.
For ANTARA.EXE:
Compatibility to Run as Administrator
Compatibility to Win XP
Compatibility to Win Vista
Compatibility to Win 98
Compatibility to Win 95
Compatibility to 16 bit colors
Compatibility to 640 X 480
Installed on my older laptop tried all same steps above with same results.

No matter what I do, no matter what computer I do it on, IT WILL NOT RUN THROUGH CUT SCENES. Separate computers with the same result indicates to me it's not a computer/OS problem but a BiA problem. These two computers are different in many ways, including processors and video cards and one is Windows 10 Pro (newer one) and one is Windows 10 Home (older one). Problem has to be with the game itself.

Yeah, BiA crashes with an Exception code: 0xc0000095. General fault. Does not help much. But pointed me to some really old websites saying potentially a CPU affinity issue. So, I made a batch file with the following contents:
start /AFFINITY 0x1 ANTARAR.EXE

It did stop it from crashing at the same point where the cutscene transitions from a close up of a guys eyes to the griffon. But, it kept crashing in the Chapter One cutscene, and I could not fix that. Seems to be known issue.
Note: game does need other compat settings like 256 color (8bit) otherwise night time is purple. And it does run at 640x480.

I wonder if it would work correctly using VirtualBox with a Windows 95 VM (or DOS with W31 installed). The game was developed for Windows 3.1 after all. Maybe projects for the weekend to fool around with. But, doing a VM is not something I would expect the casual gamer to setup and try to be honest.
I should see if it crashes on my home PC as well, since I use WINE under Linux. Would be curious about that.

Edit: It does the same thing under various versions of WINE/Proton in Linux. It also will not run in W31, nor W95, as it has been hacked for Vista+ (squirtthecat patch) that requires DirextX 9 and can't undo it.