First post, by MrFlibble
- Rank
- Oldbie
So I finally decided to try out 86Box and installed FreeDOS to run some games. One of them was The Elder Scrolls: Arena (I'm using the official freeware floppy release from Bethesda), because I'm not really happy with how it works in DOSBox. However, Arena refused to work in my 86Box/FreeDOS setup: the main menus and character generation work fine, but it seems that whenever the game tries to start rendering the actual world in the first-person view (either when starting a new game or loading a save), it just gets endlessly stuck with a black screen or a load game menu. There are no error messages displayed and 86Box keeps working, it's just that the game never gets anywhere from this state.
After some Googling I discovered that I'm apparently not the only one to have this problem in relation to FreeDOS (which is why I'm not completely sure if the topic should go in PC Emulation or just plain DOS section of The Guide):
"Elder Scrolls: Arena" hangs after character creation
Elder Scrolls: Arena in FreeDOS...
Trouble getting ems to work on freedos
Ideas for running "The Elder Scrolls: Arena" with JEMMEX
It appears that the FreeDOS Expanded memory manager might be somehow incompatible with Arena, which could be the cause of the problem (for the record, I try running the game in the FreeDOS mode that uses JEMM386, because everything else results in no EMS being used and thus the game does not run at all). I thought that perhaps replacing it with a different EMM could help, but so far I only found that older FreeDOS releases used an EMM386 manager. I downloaded it from here and replaced JEMM386 with this EMM386 in my FDCONFIG.SYS, but it seems to have no effect on the issue. Are there any other options available?
If anyone is willing to give this a try, a very easy way to check how the game works is to use the demo version that should take you straight to the dungeon without the need for character creation. Under FreeDOS, I get a black screen right after the game title in the demo.
Is there a way to determine the cause of the problem? Perhaps JEMM(EX) needs some parameters set to make it work, or maybe the executable can be hacked, or a TSR programme could work around it?