This is just plain cool. Now if everyone would feel as altruistic.... 😎

They probably read on the DOSBox web in the games section that the game works in DOSBox 0.58, so they have a link for it. I don´t know if the game works also with the current DOSBox, but if so, it would be probably better to provide a link for the new version.
Update: The link has been already changed.

I just was playing it under 0.61 with no problems.

it worked in teh version downloaded from bethsoft but was supper super slow on my athlon xp1900 1gig ram and radeon 9800 pro

i tryed version 6.1 and it won't even run it gived me this error
once i get past the vharacture creation and actuly try and play the game
Sdl lock failed over and over soemtime it will just completly freeze

version 58 work but even with max to cycles and skip it is to slow as to be unplayable

Thand

I had trouble with DOSBox 0.61 using a command line in a batch file (went to black screen), but worked ok if I did it step by step in DOSBox environment. I then tried DOSBox 0.60 and it worked fine with the command line. I upped the cycles to 9600 and memsize to 128 and it has pretty smooth movement.

I tried to play it under 0.60 ...

the first dungeon is working w/o glitch. (quite amazing, when I consider how evil was the original in version 1.0 😁 ... the free version available at Bethesda is patched to 1.06)

Then I get into city. Whatever I do, It does crash into dos prompt within 10-40 seconds. It seems somewhat connected to duration of the game, how long it is running and the amount of rendering...
I did play the dungeon on the 0 details, and after running the game, loading the dungeon save ahead of teleport, and entering it the city will last about 20-40 seconds.
When I tried to increase details, it did crash noticably faster.

The crash does look like this:
I got textmode 80x25 or what it was before running the game.
The music does continue to play. (it does not repaet the same buffer, it's MIDI and it plays ok further after crash).
I can't enter anything into the dos prompt, the keyboard interrupt is probably still hooked by game.

I did try to select no-sound for both sounds and music, it didn't help.

I think it is rendering related, I'm in the high rock (?) area, so there's snowing all the time.
Maybe the raycasting or snow effect rewrites some crucial memory.

I will try 0.61 dosbox and 0.58 than, if it will not help to overcome this.

I know (I'm game programmer 😀) it will be extremely hard for dosbox creators to help fix arena errors, but if they are interested into save-game to check by themselves, if some minor memory layout patch or some check can't help it to overcome this bug, just let me know at my mail (
"ped 7gods.org"
... you know, where the @ should go, don't you? 😀)
I can send you save game.

(or if somebody from players doesn't have problems in city, and want to check my save, let me know too, thank you)

well, tried 0.61:
Arena does start, I can get into main menu, hit Load game, the list of saved game appears... I choose the save to load, the window about loading does show, and than it doesn't go any further and stays so.
(as I noticed, there are some people claiming playing it under 0.61, so this may be issue related to my HW/SW config too, not just arena bugs 🙁)

0.58:
can load game, I can roam in a city much much longer (about 3-8 times longer, than 0.60) .. than crashed.

all three (0.58, 0.60, 0.61) can run our firs PC demo "90210" ok, that really impressed me. (http://7gods.org -> download, if you are interested in the 1995 crap 😁)
If for nothing else, I really owe big one to creators of DOSBox for this, I haven't seen our first demo for a couple of years. 😀))

BTW, my specs:
1GHz Athlon, 256MB RAM, GeForce2 MX 64MB, AC97 onboard sound
Win2k SP4 up-to-date patched, DirectX9.0b
minimum resident applications running. (no ICQ-like thingy for example 😀)

about config magic I tried with DOSBox:
latest tries were all with arena configured to "no sound"
I did disable GUS/adlib/pcspeaker/modem/etc in cofig also, set memory to 32, only SB emulation is enabled. Running it fullscreen.

I got the free release of Arena working fine under recent canadacow MT-32 and rjpa CVS builds of DOSBox. The only downside is that even my Athlon XP 2600+ doesn't have enough horsepower to run the game at full speed with the in-game detail bar set higher than about 25% (and DOSBox cycles around 10000 to 15000 if I recall correctly - that's where DOSBox maxes out my CPU when running Arena).

Maybe in the future, DOSBox will either get faster and/or I'll get a faster computer that will be able to run games like Arena at full speed with full detail 😀

I've got it running just fine on my XP1900+, at a decent speed. The key seems to have been to turn off scaling (scaler=none) and only run in fullscreen mode. I'm running DosBox 0.60 on Linux.

I haven't been able to find a manual for the game online, but I did manage to find a manual for Daggerfall. What are the major differences between the two?

Yes, the game runs fine if you don't up the detail (maximum draw distance), but if you do then it gets choppy. Back in the day, I was easily able to run at max detail on my 120MHz 486, while my 33MHz 386 had to run at around the default level to get decent framerates.

Also, what kinds of differences are you asking about between Arena and Daggerfall? Technologically they're totally different: Arena uses a Wolfenstein 3D-era engine with orthagonal walls set on a grid, while Daggerfall uses a Quake-era engine with true 3D polygons. I'm not sure how the game mechanics differ (e.g. stats, combat, items, magic).

I'm asking about mechanics differences. A lot of the differences are obvious, but I'm wondering if there are any minor changes that might trip me up.

Of course, if someone has a scanned copy of the manual, that would be great.

I can't/don't know how to get arena to work could someone walk me through how to set up dosbox because i just downloaded it from the link at bethseda and arena