Well, that's certainly an interesting way of getting DOSBox to run a game. I didn't even think it was possible.

Read README and the newbie guide in DOSBOX Guides forum. Arena works in DOSBOX.

Mirek

mirekluza wrote:

Arena works in DOSBOX.

Actually, only the floppy version works in DOSBox. The CD version gives a black screen at the startup of the game, just like what happened to ssfsx17.

are you certain you mounted everything correctly ?
cdrom did have some changes regarding the label and other things.

I'm using the version which is downloadable from BethSoft's website.

I did not mount anything. I just used two instances of Windows Explorer. I dragged the INSTALL.EXE file onto the DOSbox executable, and that ran fine. I configured the game's sound settings to be in line with DOSbox's default settings. Then I dragged the ARENA.BAT file onto the DOSbox executable, which just gives a black screen.

EDIT: I just got it to work. Instead of mounting c:\arena\ as the C drive, I just mounted, well, the C drive as the C drive. Then things worked perfectly!

Yeah, I am 😀 I've tried several options with the real CD. And I've tried to copy the contents to a local directory and mount that one as a CD. And I've tried mounting a CD image aswell. All of them is giving me a black screen.

EDIT: Above solution doesn't work for the CD version, as I never mounted the game directory itself.

I'm having the same problems with the CD version of TES:A. I also had it working under .61, but it quit working under .62
The only reason I'm not going to go back to .61 is because .61 has those annoying crashes in the dynamic CPU.

-- EDIT --
Running windows 2000, I tried all the CD compatability options.
Under .61, it ran with the standard options. You guys might have accidentally messed something up.... 😜

probably, but as none of us had the cdrom version of arena it's not easy to determine what.... (as there were many changes between 61 and 62 )

This is my first time to get TES:Arena to work in 7 years I think. I tryed the 0.63 ver. no work 0.58 ver no work 0.61 ver. viola it worked. Thanks to the author for this .I have the orignal CD ver. of the game. It works better now than it did on my 50mhz amd packerdbell bought in 1992.

I can confirm the CD version of TES 1: Arena will run with earlier versions of DOSbox, but post .61 it stopped functioning. If anyone needs a copy for development reasons, I can provide an ISO image on my webserver.

Under the new versions of DOSbox TES 1: Arena (CD VERSION not the downloadable floppy version) just comes up with a blank screen. Under the older revisions it appears to run perfectly but will crash when trying to save a game.

exactly same results

I only tried a few things, but can't seem to get it working with a recent CVS build either. I tried using various fancy CD-ROM mounting options, and I can see that the CD-ROM gets mounted properly, but the game sits at a black screen when I run it.

I'm not sure what the big deal is though, since you can legally download the floppy version for free from Bethesda's web site (and it works just fine - I'm running it now).

Looks like the devs even got around to fixing the mouse sticking problem that I reported - thanks!

EDIT: Well, it's mostly fixed: If I move the mouse slowly to the right and/or down, it won't move. However, it's a big improvement.

HunterZ wrote:

I'm not sure what the big deal is though, since you can legally download the floppy version for free from Bethesda's web site (and it works just fine - I'm running it now).

The CD version got more stuff. More speech and animations.

I noticed that the CD version I have claims that it is version 1.07, but comes with a 1.05 readme. I wonder if it has the 1.06 fixes or not?

I've never played the CD-ROM version, so it would be nice I guess to get DOSBox working with it both to see what I've missed and to see DOSBox improved.

I don't know if this will help anyone - now or in the future - but I am confused about which version of "The Elder Scrolls: Arena" that is the "CD version", the "floppy version" and/or the "download version". And which version works with which version of DOSBox.

The download-version is named Arena106.exe which must mean it is version 1.06. The fingerprint(*) looks like this:

111-05-1994  13:55            27.177 INSTALL.EXE
204-08-1994  13:29           174.021 A.EXE
308-08-1994  17:06             9.892 Read.me
402-04-2003  13:26             3.363 README.TXT
5
6614528fce4b06d0c70ba76c36d47ce0f *INSTALL.EXE
7684b87429eefab8ee3c7cd667545df1f *A.EXE
82137871cd2af0a1717c0f762ed20cbe9 *Read.me
9feef83c8e7a8b4751409400a3b300e75 *README.TXT

For me, the download/v.1.06 version only works reliably with DOSBox 0.60. I have not played the game for more than 10 minutes, but it goes through the intro, I can save & load, and I go move around.

With DOSBox 0.61 it will run only once - after that, all I get is a blank screen (OBS: I am not sure if this 'once' is once per login, or once per reboot).

I never got it to run with DOS 0.62 or later - the same blank screen as with 0.61.

HunterZ wrote:

you can legally download the floppy version for free from Bethesda's web site (and it works just fine - I'm running it now).

HunterZ - which version of DOSBox are you using?
_________________
Re: Fingerprint

There are a lot of files in the install directory, dating from January 19, 1994 to April 2, 2004. For the fingerprinting, I choose the two main EXE-files.

I'm using a recent CVS that I built myself. I was able to play it for a good half-hour at least with no problems, except that it froze once when I set the cycles too high (I have to use dynamic core and run the cycles up pretty high to get a smooth framerate with the in-game detail slider set higher than 50% or so)

With the CD-ROM version I have the same problem as everyone else - blank screen with "ACD.EXE" running.

On my PC, setting SDL_VIDEODRIVER=windib allows DOSBox 0.61 to get past the problem with the blank screen on start-up, but 0.61 still hangs when loading a saved game.

I might try that with my CVS build, but I'd be surprised if it has any effect since I don't have video problems with any other DOSBox games.

Is that a dosbox.conf setting or an environment variable?

Environment variable. An old list, but better than nothing:
http://sdldoc.csn.ul.ie/sdlenvvars.php