well first of all you seem to be using an old version of dosbox.
not that it will solve your problem
next sdl-lock faileds are outside the control of dosbox (we just report them to you)

you might have luck in seeing if there are new video drivers available for your videocard.

Using the newest omega drivers for my 9800Pro and have tried multiple versions of DB, all same results. Ver 61 produced best results, but still crashes.
Thanks,
BT

As of now, if i am not mistaken these are the latest drivers versions:

nVIDIA -> ForceWare 66.93
ATi -> Catalyst 4.12

I have a 9800 Pro 256MB AGP 8x using the stock Catalyst 4.12's (I prefer to tweak them myself using ATI Tray Tools and Radlinker, rather than relying on Omega/DNA/whatever pre-tweaks and weird OpenGL version substitutions) and DOSBox 0.63 and Arena works fine for me. Try the following:

1. Use stock DOSBox 0.63 with the included version of the SDL DLLs (using versions from other DOSBox releases or the SDL web site or whatever may cause instability, as the DOSBox devs test each version of DOSBox with whatever SDL DLLs they include with it).
2. Set memsize=32 in your dosbox.conf (since EMS maxes out at 32MB anyways).
3. Configure Arena to use no sound (just to narrow things down - if it works then try enabling sound and see if that breaks it).
4. Make sure you're using the latest patched version of Arena as well (Bethesda games are BUGGY because they're big and ambitious for their times).

The game is a bit slow for me on an Athlon XP 2600+ w/1GB RAM under Win XP SP2. Using the dynamic core helps. You'll probably also run into annoying mouse cursor problems (which have been reported to QBix and will hopefully be investigated).

Well, finally got it working. What I did was:

Put arena on IBM P-133 64MB machine, hooked IBM into my KVM. All is well. Also gotta love the sound from my AWE64 Gold. Thanks for all the help, but I think that arena just runs best in its own pond.. 😁 Good thing is I can also run Daggerfall no problems, and when I pick up another cheap ATX case I have a PII-300 and a 3dfx 16MB Voodoo3 that plays Redguard like a champ... 😎

Cheers,
BT

I don't like these oddball driver hack-up collections out there. These people don't write the code. They are just guessing and they can't possibly have a large enough sample of systems to get it right....if 'right' is even possible by hacking registry settings and mixing driver revisions.......

swaaye: agreed. Not only do you depend on them to guess the best settings for your system (as you mentioned) but also you're relying on them having a clue about what all the tweakable options do and which way to set them for the best blend of stability, performance, and quality (which I might add is a very subjective thing).