The Elder Scrolls: Arena w/ Gravis Ultrasound in DOSBox [HOWTO]

[MrFlibble]

A while ago I realised that using Gravis Ultrasound emulation in DOSBox can produce superior sound quality, and since The Elder Scrolls: Arena supports GUS for sound and music, I set off to try it out.

The game is known to be very demanding of base memory, and a user in another forum reported that he had to drop GUS for SB because of frequent Insufficient Base Memory crashes.

I tried out several DOSBox builds and setups, and I believe to have achieved more or less stable performance with GUS using DOSBox ECE (it's a good yet sadly discontinued DOSBox fork).

I downloaded GUS patches/software from here and installed them in DOSBox with this guide. The Arena version I'm using is the freeware 1.06 floppy release from Bethesda.

The game ins installed into C:\ARENA directory on the mounted C: drive. The trick was to run the game with the version of ULTRAMID.EXE that it comes with, rather than stock ULTRAMID.EXE you get with the GUS patches.

Another issue is the game speed, it can get too slow or too fast depending on how many cycles you emulate in DOSBox. For now, I've settled on giving it slightly more cycles than necessary and using the built-in "delay" function that slows the game down.

I created the following batch file ARENA.BAT to start it from the root:

Code: Select all

config -set cpu cycles=max 98%% limit 47810
config -set cpu core=dynamic
config -set dos ems=emm386
LH C:\ARENA\ULTRAMID.EXE
cd ARENA
A -sa:240 -si:5 -sd:3 -ma:240 -mq:5 -md:3 -sgf1digi.adv -mgf1midi.adv -delay:2
cd..
config -set dos ems=true
config -set cpu core=auto
config -set cpu "cycles=auto 6075 98%% limit 33445"
cls

According to DOSBox-X, 47810 cycles roughly equals a 486 DX5 133 MHz. That should be a pretty powerful CPU, but setting delay to 4 (as the Arena readme suggests for a Pentium) makes everything too slow. At a delay of 2, however, the player's movement speed in cities at full detail level is pretty good, while the citizens also move around at reasonable speeds, and the animation of static NPCs isn't too fast either.

[Rwolf]

Interesting; I have the GoG version, I'll see if I can try it out in the weekend.
(I think the default is some Soundblaster compatible emuation with General Midi, but I have not played it beyond the initial bit.)

[MrFlibble]

Interesting; I have the GoG version, I'll see if I can try it out in the weekend.

IIRC the GOG version (which is CD version 1.07, but largely similar to the floppy 1.06, except perhaps is has less memory issues?) is configured to run at 30,000 cycles without any further adjustments to the DOSBox config, and DOSBox is the standard 0.74-3 version. It seems to run okay overall with these specs, but maybe a little too fast or too slow at times.

Very regrettably, the game does not take advantage of other GUS capabilites, and it is still stuck with being able to only play one sound effect at a time.