you are typing:

chdir ARENA

right?

Where on your hard drive have you put the game?
What are your mount settings in DOSBox?
How are you trying to run the game?
Is it the floppy, or the CD version?
If it's the CD version, what version of DOSBox are you using?

There's a typo in the instructions you're following. "CD\ARENA" should be "CD \ARENA" or "CD ARENA", doesn't matter which.

That's not a typo. DOS allows you to omit the space in some cases, this is one of them.

`Moe` wrote:

That's not a typo. DOS allows you to omit the space in some cases, this is one of them.

It may not be a typo, but it's a very common error when trying to Arena from Bethsoft's instructions if you take a look at their official forum. Replacing it with one of alternatives I've offered, the vast majority of problems of this nature are fixed.

Out of curiosity, would you explain what your "fix" changes? As far as DOS goes, "CD\ARENA" and "CD \ARENA" are exactly the same. Unless it triggers a bug somewhere, I can't see why it should make any difference.

`Moe` wrote:

Out of curiosity, would you explain what your "fix" changes? As far as DOS goes, "CD\ARENA" and "CD \ARENA" are exactly the same. Unless it triggers a bug somewhere, I can't see why it should make any difference.

I have absolutely no idea 😁

I'm just reporting from what people have people have said on the official TES forums which I surf around in fairly often. It could be an issue with DOSBox 0.58 aswell as that's the one refered to by Bethsoft since it was the current version when the game became freeware.

Hmmm. "CD\ARENA" and "CD \ARENA" behave EXACTLY THE SAME in DOSBox (as it's supposed to). Maybe some DOSBox programmer may have a better insight on this.

use 0.63

0.58 is old and probably doesn't support the "missing" space between cd and \arena

Bethsoft removed reference to 0.58 at my request because it is very, very old and we didn't want people to experience problems (like this one possibly) that could be fixed by using a more current version (0.63 or CVS).