You could try:
- making an image of the CD and mounting it via IMGMOUNT (or an external program such as Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120%), or
- mount the directory you copied the files into as a drive in DOSBox:
mount d c:\whatever -t cdrom

Your mileage may vary.

thanks for the suggestions - dosbox is not an option as I want to play without virtualization. Now, if I make an image of the CD, how do I convince arena to use that drive instead of the one it's installed on?

You could reinstall it from the mounted drive instead of the actual CD drive. That should do it. It should also be possible to edit the configuration file and change drive letters around. The installation program itself might do that, too. I don't know as I only have the disk version.

Yep, that's what I'd do. If you *really* don't want to make an image, though, there's also the subst command, which is similar in function to DOSBox's mount command for this purpose.

thanks you guys - i think this might work! Now, can i just drop my old savegames into the new install folder?

Yes. Actually, you should also be able to install over the top of the original installation folder, and your saved games should still be there and be usable.

wait a tick - will i still be able to use an emulated drive if i drop down to dos?

can i use mscdex for this purpose? here is what my bootfloppy looks like:

for autoexec.bat

@ECHO OFF
LH /L:1 mouse.com
LH C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:IDECD001
LH C:\essolo.COM

and then for config.sys

DEVICEHIGH=C:\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:IDECD001

now i'm assuming that i have to change idecd001 to idecd002? and then maybe set vide-cdd.sys to a file in the alcohol %120 folder? uh oh

I don't think it's going to work - but the game works so much better off the HD - as long as I stay in Windows. Question is - how do I get sound to work now?

No, MSCDEX can only mount CD-ROM drives, as it's designed to talk to a .SYS driver (VIDE-CDD.SYS in this case) that is specific for the model of CD-ROM drive you're using.

The SUBST utility is what you want to use for this:

1C:\>subst /?
2Associates a path with a drive letter.
3
4SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]
5SUBST drive1: /D
6
7  drive1:        Specifies a virtual drive to which you want to assign a path.
8  [drive2:]path  Specifies a physical drive and path you want to assign to
9                 a virtual drive.
10  /D             Deletes a substituted (virtual) drive.
11
12Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.

Also, before giving up on using the actual CD when running in pure DOS mode, you might want to investigate using SMARTDRV to cache CD accesses, as it can improve performance significantly.

Be careful about backing up savegame files. It's not just one or two files it's like half the bloody folder! I had a lot of truoble with backing up my savegames and as a result had to start over because I didn't save them all.

I had looked into using smartdrv, but it doesn't seem to work the way the Arena manual explains it in win98. For example there is no smartdrv.sys in my Windows install - not sure where to find it. There is a smartdrv.exe but that only works in dos-mode, and I'm not sure how to use it on a boot floppy.

Here's what I did - I took Music's advice about savegames, and I backed up the whole folder by renaming it to arena_cd.old, then re-installed, from the emulated drive (F:) and renamed the new folder arenacd.tmp - then changed the arena_cd.old back to arena_cd. :) Then I changed the line in arena.bat from @E: (my cd-rom) to @F: (the alcohol drive)

I tried running the game directly from windows by simply double-clicking the arena.bat file in c:\arena_cd and while this often doesn't work, in this case, maybe the emulated drive helped windows keep track of things, because it loaded up it's own dos window and the sound was working just fine. At this point the problem is that the game usually freezes up quickly because of having not quite enough conventional memory (I have about 601k, but you should have 603 min. according to the manual) BUT I don't know whether it is due to the emulated drive but i've been playing for a while now and no freeze-ups.

If I do have any other problems I will try Hunter's suggestion and use subst.
and let you know how that goes.

Cheers u2