Hi. I've read in places that Arena is almost impossible to get running smoothly on a modern computer.

Well, at default it's perfectly smooth. Default has detail not even half way up. I think I can put it up to about half and keep the same FPS.

But on full it's practically only half as fast.

I have core on auto and cycles on max. Or is it the opposite? Whatever, one of those.

Does anyone have it going at full speed on full detail? And is detail just draw distance? Thanks.

I came to this forum to ask this question as well... Except for me, it doesn't run smoothly even at the lowest detail setting.

I tried turning detail up and didn't see a difference... still couldn't see five feet in front of my face. I can't remember if it's always that foggy... even outside?

Bump - has anyone managed this?

There are a few tweaks for Dosbox - Look in the Wiki, or search google for DosBox settings. Changing the output to directx and adding a frame skip or 2 will speed up the game. If your unclear about reconfiguring Dosbox, the the best bet is to use a frontend (DBGL is nice). The speed also depends on the horsepower of your computer, so few details about your computer would help. I have a quad core I-5 750, 4 gig ram and the game runs fine....

JimC

Not a massive gaming computer but good enough to run the games I like (Oblivion and older, mostly).
3ghz Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading
1 gig ram
512 Radeon HD 4650



Also, anyone have any info yet on what detail actually does? I can't really see any extra draw distance.

Someone on another forum suggest holding ctrl and pressing f12 a couple of times... Just don't press it too many times or else the game might actually run too fast.

DOSBox settings can work differently on different setups, but the big ones that seemed to speed things up for me were the following:

scaler=normal2x (don't use one of the "prettier" scalers, it really slows it down.)

core=dynamic
cputype=pentium_slow
cycles=max

You shouldn't need to configure much else. I run on full detail, and all that does is increase your draw distance. People are saying they don't see a difference, but if you're outdoors or if you have a "light" spell active, you can definitely tell the difference. It makes navigating cities easier. Beyond that, your draw distance isn't going to dramatically affect your playing.

As for my system, I'm using a 2ghz core 2 duo with 2 gigs of ram. Nothing special by any means.

Thanks for solving this very annoying problem. :hugs: