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"Elder Scrolls: Arena" hangs after character creation

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First post, by vanfanel

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Hi there,

I have Elder Scrolls: Arena (Floppy version 1.06 from Bethesda) starting on different systems, all of them using FreeDOS, and in all of them I have the same problem: the game starts, but then hangs on a black screen after I create the character and go into the game itself just after the goddess talks to you.

FreeDOS uses JEMMEX as it's default memory manager, so I am simply loading it with:

DEVICE=C:\FREEDOS\BIN\JEMMEX.EXE

My FDAUTO.BAT simply loads the sound driver and CTMOUSE.

After all that, I have 625KB of conventional memory free and plenty of EMS and XMS:

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WHAT does "Elder Scrolls: Arena" want then?? What does that game expect??

I have been fighting this game for days now to make it work: it's the same on very different systems. No matter if I have sound hardware or not, no matter how I set it up using it's setup program, etc etc
Runs great in DosBOX, but... why doesn't it run on real hardware under FreeDOS? Any ideas, please?

Reply 1 of 2, by Rwolf

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I only have this from the GoG version 1.07 CD, using the bundled DOSBox 0.74 - which is using FreeDOS, but not JEMMEX.

In the GoG DOSBox config log 'stdout.txt' there is a line: "Memory sizes above 31 MB are NOT recommended."
Not sure if they mean the total memory or just the EMS size, but I have had other programs failing with too much memory;
the effect is usually a wrap-around that makes it look like too little memory. There could be some error printout/log somewhere if that is the case?

Googling for Arena & Freedos combined use, it seems to be an issue in Linux as well, but with some error messages.

The game lists some compatibility issues in the quick-reference document, with other types of memory managers: 386MAX, Multimedia Cloaking, O/S 2, QEMM (before version 7.0) - so maybe there is something JEMMEX related?

Reply 2 of 2, by vanfanel

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Rwolf wrote on 2023-05-17, 13:41:
I only have this from the GoG version 1.07 CD, using the bundled DOSBox 0.74 - which is using FreeDOS, but not JEMMEX. […]
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I only have this from the GoG version 1.07 CD, using the bundled DOSBox 0.74 - which is using FreeDOS, but not JEMMEX.

In the GoG DOSBox config log 'stdout.txt' there is a line: "Memory sizes above 31 MB are NOT recommended."
Not sure if they mean the total memory or just the EMS size, but I have had other programs failing with too much memory;
the effect is usually a wrap-around that makes it look like too little memory. There could be some error printout/log somewhere if that is the case?

Googling for Arena & Freedos combined use, it seems to be an issue in Linux as well, but with some error messages.

The game lists some compatibility issues in the quick-reference document, with other types of memory managers: 386MAX, Multimedia Cloaking, O/S 2, QEMM (before version 7.0) - so maybe there is something JEMMEX related?

I also suspect JEMMEX, that's why I want to know if someone has succeeded making Arena work under FreeDOS, which uses JEMMEX by default...
JEMMEX allows to limit the amount of XMS and EMS memory that it makes available to the programs. I already tried that and it didn't work for "Elder Scrolls: Arena".

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