The Elder Scrolls: Arena (FREE!)

[madphilb]

I stopped by the offical Elder Scrolls web site last night and they're celebrating a 10th anniversary this month. Part of that celebration they are letting people download the original game that started it all, Arena. (They're also giving away some cool stuff if you register with them for the giveaway contest).

The hit RPG Morrowind is the 3rd in the series of ES RPGs, Areana being the first, and quite a change from what most RPGs had been.

Just a note, the graphics are dated, and you may experience some issues getting it running as it's a DOS program (not a Windows one), but they also link to DOSBox which should be of interest to not only Windows XP/2000 users but Linux users as well, it emulates the whole processor as well as the sound and video. It runs too slowly on this machine for this game, but it may be a solution for others with faster systems (I've heard it runs slow but playable on a 1.4Ghz PC)

Some help if available in the ES Forums as well down at the bottom of the page in the Other Games section.

Thought I'd pass it along, I might see if I can get it working better for myself later today, stupid thing crashed on me as I was leaving the 1st dungeon (stupid windows).

[glitch1501]

thanks man, ill go dl it later today

[Zal-Utaon III]

sounds good thanks

[Lightbringer]

Im a big fan of Morrowind, so i may look in on this, thanks for the info.

Lightbringer // Aaron

[Flying_Penguen]

I played everquest and the 3rd one actually got me to stop playing for a month. Thats good in my book.

[madphilb]

Now if they'd just release Daggerfall for free, that one is supposed to be much better (the engine is much more enhanced as well as the character system looking more like the one currently used by Morrowind).

[Da Rabid Duckie]

Oh great, just what I needed... even MORE Elder Scrolls to suck up my time. :p

[shooraijin]

DOSBox is available too for the Mac, btw. I had to do some tweaking to get it to work in OS X, and there's no GUI (for people who care about that), but it works pretty well! I got Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max Hit the Road running flawlessly in it over the weekend.

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

[Straylight]

I've got "day of the tentacle" up and running as well, in the ScummVM engine they released. Great game.

[Saint]

Thanks for the heads up.

[madphilb]

BTW, if you're getting a "Insufficent Base Memory" error when you play the game, you need to free up more memory in your DOS window (this is for 98/ME owners). I was able to free up enough on my machine by not loading the DOS drivers for my CD-ROM (as far as I know I can still access the CD under 98 with Windows native drivers that don't load into DOS memory).

Anyway, It's been too long (and not much of an issue for me), so I'm not much help in suggesting other things to do, but I'm sure you can find sources if it's a problem. Faster/Newer machines might be better off using DOSBox (and there are some good tips on both the official ES forums as well as the DOSBox website).


As for the game itself, it's very dated by todays standards, but pretty impressive for what it does and for the time it came out. It's easy to see why this is such a sucessfull series.