Outside of Dosbox, Lemmings 2 is notoriously hard to run with or without L2-FIX. I have loose memories of L2 wanting a FAT16 primary partition.
But give it a try on your MS-DOS machine with L2-FIX and let us know!
-- Simon
It works now! Yes, that L2-FIX did the trick.
Yes, this is on a FAT-16. I'm still wondering what the original problem was. I think I'd first tried to replay the game a few years after first getting it, on the same computer as it originally worked on, and had that problem. I don't think think there had been any serious changes, perhaps an upgrade from MS-DOS 5.0. The 386 I dug out is running 6.0 or 6.2, fairly similar hardware to the original.
What I did have in case anyone else has the same problem... the game didn't start properly when I was using DISPLAY.SYS. Whether I used L2-FIX or not, it got through the startup text then hung with a black screen where the main menu should have appeared. Removing the localisations from AUTOEXEC and CONFIG solved that. I don't think it was anything like lack of or badly configured memory - the game also worked with AUTOEXEC and CONFIG completely bypassed (and starting a mouse driver from the command line).
I still have the problem with cannons not firing properly, causing the occasional lemming to fall through a trampoline and die. That was one reason why I wanted to try the game again - see if I can get the "gold standard" end of game.
Chris