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(Copied & edited from previous replies per request.)

PART I: Running DOS BOX

DOS Box creates a virtual computer on your real computer. To get it to work, you also have to make a virtual hard drive for it and if you play cd games, a virtual cd drive as well. This is accomplished using the MOUNT command. It looks basically like this:

MOUNT (virtual drive name) (real drive name)

After DOS Box starts you type in the MOUNT commands and then hit enter. Once you figure it out, you can also put the lines at the end of your config file so they will run automatically every time you start.

To make the virtual hard drive, you have to pick a location for it it use. In my case, I use the games folder on my real drive. So it looks like this:

Z:\> MOUNT C C:\GAMES (Enter)

What I’m doing is telling it to make the games folder on my real drive the C drive on the virtual computer.

I use my 2nd cd drive (e) for the virtual cd so my command looks like this:

Z:\> MOUNT D E:\ -T CDROM (Enter)

This tells it to make the e drive on my real computer the D drive on the virtual one. The tag -T CDROM tells it it’s a cd so it can do whatever it needs to do.

After you get those two lines in, you’re ready to rock. Arena is in a folder called ARENA in my games directory. So to start it you do this:

Z:\> C: (Enter) <-- switch to the C drive (I also have this line at the end of my config file)

C:\> CD ARENA (Enter) <-- change to the ARENA folder

C:\ARENA> ARENA (Enter) <-- run the game


PART II: Getting up to speed

The reason Arena runs slow on DOS Box is because you have to increase the speed of the virtual computer. This is shown at the top where it says:

Cpu Cycles: 3000

After you start, hit Ctrl-F12 to increase it. It will prolly go in increments of 500. I just started tinkering with Arena and I'm finding the comfort zone to be somewhere between 15000-20000. Once you find where you like, you can also put this in your config file so it starts at that value automatically.

Oh, and one last thing - to switch to fullscreen hit Alt-Enter.

Hope this helps everyone. Long live DOS - The last thing Microsoft made that kinda worked!

Welcome hoss, I swa that codex offered to sticky this and since he is not here at the moment, I took the liberty. Thank you for your input that should help a few people out.

Thanks for the welcome, greetings to all!

Thanks bear. And hoss, hope to see you around in the other forums as well

I know I probably don't have to have permission to move this information to the wiki, but do you think I could? Currently the DOSbox guide for running arena sends you to the daggerfall one. And that one wasn't very helpful for me.

Asking hoss through pm or e-mail would probably be the best bet!

this was really helpful with all other dos games that i play

I figured out my problem. Now I would like to know a couple of things. First, where do I find the controls and second, can I play in full screen?

The DOSbox controls are in the readme file, for Arena controls, see the the wiki. Alt-Enter takes you into fullscreen.

I figured it out on my own over the weekend. Thanks anyway though.

Hello everyone
And Thanks hoss_streebeck DOS Box guide it's really helpful for me.

Cannot understand how to make virtual drive?

hi, I kinda have a problem, so I run Arena and give cycles count to max. when I am in City it works well but in dungeons it sucks and also when I max the details it becomes very slow. any solutions?

core = dynamic

I would really recommend use this in dosbox.conf. Basically, this option enables JIT, and if you know what it is, you won't turn it off unless it makes game glitch. Completely erased any lag for me.

I had the same kind of problem with both max cycles and fixed cycles. At the same speed setting the game would zip ultra fast in cities yet slow down almost to a crawl in the wilderness around the same city.

I discovered that there's an option in DOSBox to limit the maximum amount of CPU cycles it emulates instead of using either as many cycles as the host machine can handle or a fixed amount of cycles. This parameter is described in detail in the DOSBox Wiki here and here. Using this seems to positively affect game performance.

The DOSBox Wiki suggests that 26,800 cycles is a rough equivalent of a 486 66 MHz, so to set this value as the cycles ceiling DOSBox will emulate you need to use the following in dosbox.conf:

I put 70% as an arbitrary value simply by judging that 100% will be too much anyway. You can try another percentage value but the max cycles will be decided by what you put after the limit parameter. Don't use auto because Arena is a real mode programme and will not switch to max cycles automatically.

This can be used in combination with the built-in speed control as described in the game manual. Add the -delay:# command line parameter to ARENA.BAT. The developers suggest -delay:3 as acceptable speed but this is a bit slow for the emulated 486 (may be good for a Pentium though), -delay:2 seems good.

AFAIK the severe slowdown during the fade-in animation of on-screen messages has been found to be caused by the fullscreen double buffering option in DOSBox, so this is suggested to be turned off. However you can also turn off the fade-in animation in-game by pressing F4 according to the manual.

JIC someone misses the other thread, recently I experimented with running Arena in DOSBox with Gravis UltraSound emulation, and have come up with a setup that works rather decently for me, although the speed in the game is still very uneven, down to different frame rates in different parts of the same dungeon.

The uneven speed might be due to the view distance. The Detail(s?) game setting, which tends to confuse people because it has no effect on the game's graphics quality, is for controlling the view distance that the game renders. I always set it at the maximum level, which runs fine when emulating a high CPU speed-- say, 50000. But with a lower CPU setting there can be very noticeable slowdowns in towns or dungeons depending on how close you are to the town's walls or dungeon's borders. Basically, it seems like the game doesn't load and render as much data about what to draw if you're closer to a boundary wall than the view distance, so the game can seem to be running slowly-- or at its normal speed-- if you're in the center of a town or dungeon, but then speed up noticeably if you're close to a boundary wall, especially in a corner of the map where you're close to two boundary walls.

That seems like a good explanation! I play with max detail settings too, but I think that uneven speeds remain at very high emulated cycle counts too (50,000 is quite a lot), perhaps being less noticeable. On the other hand, higher cycle count makes screen tearing more apparent.

What has always annoyed me is that when you crank up CPU cycles, NPC animations in towns also speed up, but if you use the built-in speed adjustment (pressing the plus or minus keys in-game, or using the -delay command lime parameter), this not only slows down the animations, but also the entire game's speed. In fact, just recently I ran a test with a relatively low amount of fixed cycles and tested various detail settings, and I can confirm that when you max out the details, this also slows down NPC animations along with movement speed. I guess this is yet another example of sloppy coding on Bethesda's part.