I remember having this problem with Magic Carpet 2 back in the day. When playing in SVGA mode, the game would crash back to DOS after about 15-30 minutes of playing. I tried to see if with DosBox and the version GOG has this would change, but that does not seem to be the case. I know this is rather vague, but would anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? I'll happily provide more information if I can.

The Magic Carpet titles were optimized for Pentium CPUs. They even show the Intel Pentium logo on start, if a Pentium processor is detected. As the game is supposed to use slightly different algorithms on Pentium machines, this could solve the crash issue. You can try to configure the DOSBox environment in which Magic Carpet runs to emulate a Pentium CPU.

Open the dosbox config file and look for the [CPU] section.

Set the following entry:
cputype=pentium_slow

In addition you can try to use
core=dynamic
cycles=max

Unfortunately that does not seem to help with this issue. While testing the settings, I did run into another aspect of the crash which shows up now and then. When the screen flashes white upon completing a mission objective, sometimes everything in sight loses textures, and the game locks up a few seconds after that.

Should the intro be displaying the Pentium logo when I have DosBox CPU set to pentium_slow? That does not happen for me.

I can confirm that Magic Carpet 1 shows the logo, but I'm not sure about Magic Carpet 2.

Unfortunately the game is very buggy, because it was rushed to completion and released with many bugs including a fatal bug that often causes the game to crash. As far as I know there's no (un-)official patch.

As you already found out, in low-res mode the game runs more stable.

Thank you for your suggestions. It's a shame about Magic Carpet 2 being buggy. Overall I enjoy it much more than the first one.

The problem also happens in certain levels in the lower res. I think it has something to do with the amount of memory available, and reducing the memory available (I had 64MB at the time) to the game fixes that to a degree, last time i checked, but I don't know how to eliminate the problem. the high res mode makes the problem appear more often, and the low res tends to only happen in crowded levels, such as the one with the final wizard battle of the game.

Not sure if anyone cares any more but I resolved the crash issue (which was happening every few minutes in the level I was on) by editing "cycles" in dosboxmagiccarpet2.conf to "fixed 128000". Crashing completely stopped after this. You might have to change the number depending on your system (ie 128000 might be too fast or too slow). Also note the file says to use the format "fixed #number" suggesting you need a hashtag but it won't work if you include a hashtag.