Why is Civilization III crashing on some of my computers?

I have been unable to get Civilization III to run properly on some of my machines; a Fujitsu U810 and Fujitsu P1630.

I have tried Windows XP SP3 and Vista (both 32-bit) on the U810 and Windows XP 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit SP1 on the P1630.

I have successfully installed all of the drivers for both these machines and tested against the video drivers provided by Fujitsu as well as the latest drivers from Intel with no differences in result.

I had thought initially that the problem was due to the maximum resolution of the U810 (600 pixels) being less than the minimum resolution required by the game (768 pixels). Attaching an external monitor did not make a difference. The maximum resolution of the P1630 does support 768 pixels but made no difference.

I have tried the original vanilla release installed from CD with and without the latest 1.29f patch and the latest Conquerors release from CD with and without the latest 1.22 patch. I also tried with the GOG release.

The error message is this on Windows XP:

And this on Windows 7 (identical):

I have tried both full-screen exclusive mode as well as full-screen windowed mode with KeepRes=1 in conquests.ini. I have also tried providing explicit Video Mode=1024 and disabling the intro video with PlayIntro=0

Civilization III will work fine on some of my other computers including my modern Ryzen desktop with GeForce or Radeon graphics on Windows 10 but I cannot get it to run on these older machines.

I thought that this might be related to the Intel graphics chipset. However, I found that Intel’s own website lists this game (Civilization III: Conquerers) as a supported title for the GMA 945 found in the Fujitsu U810.

Here is a screenshot of the code area where the assertion happens as viewed through a debugger:

I’m not sure where to go from here to debug this further.