The –externalgui flag in SDL-Hercules triggers dyngui initialization, which expects a GUI framework to be present and segfaults when there isn't one. Since sysgen just reads stdout/stderr lines directly via subprocess.PIPE and searches for specific strings like HHC message codes, it works perfectly fine without that flag. This is likely a sysgen bug that was never caught because older Hercules builds had dyngui as an external .so that failed gracefully rather than segfaulting. false