When the ship explodes, it can have a few causes:
- You fly into something

- Time's up
- You got to the end of the level without getting 10 stars
I must add something to the level interface that returns a text at the start of the level explaining what you must do, I guess.
I don't know what goes wrong on your desktop PC. What kind video hw do you have? Did you get any errors, or VM dump or something?
The 'strange resolution' is actually 800x600 in 16 or 32 bit (16 default, 32 if available) @60 Hz if available (or any other refresh rate if 60 hz is not available).
I would think any video card should be able to display that, so it's probably something else going wrong :-/
Thanks

Erik