I recently noticed that Blue Max for the C64 will fail when I play it repeatedly on my NTSC C64 with the U1541 II used as a disk drive.

the pattern is

• Wongo loads the game in an NTSC environment
• Wongo chooses his options from the in-game startup menu
• Wongo plays and loses
• Wongo presses fire to play again

Repeat

Usually by the time I unlock the final mission, I know I'm getting close to a crash.  At some point, I will die or land then press fire to start again or take off and the crash happens.  The on-screen text seems to be orange with a dark gray background (I don't know if that is meaningful).  The READY prompt is usually there. I think one time it let me type, but usually a reset is required.  Everything on the screen except READY is garbled characters that seem randomly placed on the screen.  For the above occurrence, the READY prompt was not visible.

I think I have repro ready here: Blue Max Crash Repro Files

Files in this directory

FileName / Type / Description

• AnotherCrash.vsf / snapshot / game has crashed dying on final mission
• BeforeCrash.vsf / snapshot / Start of final mission, can repro a game exit/crash by landing/dying after bombing white buildings
• BlueMax.d64 / C64 disk image / Will repro the problem, +10 crack version by Remember
• BLUEMAX1_NoRepro.T64 / C64 tape image / Could not repro the problem when loading a tape, +10 crack version by Remember
• crash settings.ini / Vice settings file / Just choose Machine->Model->C64 NTSC
• crashed.vsf / snapshot / game has crashed after completing the final mission successfully