[Ygern]

Bethesda has offered it for free


(Right click and Save As)

[Ygern]

[Toccatta]

To play Arena, unless you have an ancient DOS (or Windows 3.1, 3.11, or Win95) computer dedicated to the game, you'll need to run a DOS emulator like DOSbox. The game will either fail to run at all or will run unreliably without an emulator on modern PCs. You can find helpful instructions on how to configure it for Arena here:

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/General:Playin ... der_DOSBox

[uncle fuzzy]

[Toccatta]

I had so much trouble getting the character to swim or even walk backwards while running in DOS mode in Win98 that I didn't want to tell others it was fully compatible. The problem went away when I used DOSbox to emulate DOS instead of running in DOS mode.

Did you find a way to overcome that limitation or did you just never encounter it? I know some earlier DOS programs ran at the CPU limit instead of using the clock to limit speed. As CPUs became more powerful, many of them became too fast to play correctly. Is it possible that Arena and Daggerfall just run too fast on newer hardware without an emulator designed to slow them down to their original speeds (Even on my old Win98 machine)? I never had a problem on my old 80486 running Win95, but by the time I was upgrading to Win98, I was already using a pentium and the games ran unreliably.

[Gawain]

I can't speak for Arena or Daggerfall, but as for hardware, Pentium was never an issue. CPU clocks usually started to speed up some DOS games from frequencies around 500-600MHz, which was already a Pentium III, some even at 1GHz+. I had a trouble running one helicopter simulator on LAN with my friend due to different CPU speeds.

[uncle fuzzy]

I haven't noticed any problems. It might be more cpu speed than OS. The P II 400 is the slowest thing I could find- other than my original computer, 386SX-25 with W 3.11 and DOS 6.22.

I'll drop a warning here if I do have trouble later.

[Drakkmore]

I'm not quite sure but wasn't one of the patches for Arena meant to slow the game timer for faster processors? some time around Pentium II IIRC.
Any way I play it on P II machine with about 256 ram, and it runs just fine in win 98 no issues going backwards, or swimming.