(re: Looking for King’s Quest I (original) )
The crashes because of a corrupt disk are indeed because of saving. When the bootable version of KQ1 saved a game, it did so in a way that stopped the disk from being bootable. IIRC, the game itself had a command “format disk”, which created a “play disk” which was identical to the original game disk in every way. It was even bootable. Saving a game, though, made the game playable from that disk, but not bootable.