just spent half a hour with trying to get the 'ucker working in dosbox but no success. it seems it has problems with MSCDEX and won't accept the cd, let it be mounted by mount with special parameters in dosbox, with subst or fakecd, none of these worked

if i were you i'd just try running it on virtual machine in win95/98

Might be a stupid question, but the last time you made it work was it with the last version of DOSBox?

Sometimes the newer version of DOSBox have issues with particular games...

i don't think mscdex drivers would be tweaked in previous version of dosbox and wouldn't be in newer :p

It's possible that a modification that fixed issues with one thing caused problems with another.
I saw this sort of thing happen dozens of times when betatesting the Space Hulk remake for Teardown.