I finaly got to Arena and my dad made it work grat and I was playing happly and it hit me Arena could work grat on DS!S do you all think.

cant/never gonna happen. Arena was made on a DOS format, and last i checked a DS does not have DOS format. while a DS could handle the graphics, gameplay and controls, the fact is that the game is just to old to be able to reformat into a DS format. I would require them to recode the whole game, and since its already free on computer and wouldnt sell as a new game, its not worth the manpower.


sorry mate.

Well I meen in thory would you play it if it would work?

oh okay, properly no as i dont have a DS, if i did, maybe, its not that great a game in todays standards, but i dont know what you can get on a DS so....

The DS could handle it, yes. But it would take a lot of work and would not sell well, since it is free already.

If I could do that though, I'd bundle Arena and Daggerfall with updated graphics and some new features and easier game play, and put it into one game for the DS.

Yea but my dad works at fixing things like DOSbox and it took him an hour to make it work so people who are not trained find it harder.

It took him about an hour to make what work?

If I had a DS I would buy it.
The screwing around with DOs is just nagging.

Um...so what if it's a DOS game? By that logic they would never be able to turn PC games into console games.

Get Arena to work in DOSBox, I guess.


The ones who turn PC games into console games have the game source and game assets to use. The Arena source isn't available.

Um...so what if it's a DOS game? By that logic they would never be able to turn PC games into console games.

Which games written only for the PC have been turned into console games without being heavily if not entirely rewritten? I'm not challenging you, merely curious.

You mean to tell me that Bethesda just deleted all their Arena files? "Oh, perhaps we'll never need this again". I highly doubt that.

Off the top of my head, Half-Life 2. Originally for the PC, now on consoles.

Deus ex was the same on the pc and playstation 2, I've played both versions. The only difference I could find between them was the levels on the ps2 version were loading a lot more frequent as you walked about, probably so they could fit in the ps2's memory.

...

O.K., you guys got me. But, uh, were those DOS games? Pretty sure Half-Life wasn't. Don't know about Deus X...sorta doubt it though.

No, Deus Ex wasn't DOS its requirements were win95/98.
It goes to show not all console games have to be dumbed down just because they're ported from the PC.

...

Well, keep in mind that America's Army happens to appear to sell decently on consoles, when on the PC, it's a free download.


That could post problems, given that Daggerfall's total size is around 500MB, (yes, comparable to Morrowind) and as I recall, DS cartridges capped at 128MB, though they might have put out a 256MB version. (I don't quite know)


I would note that since 1996, Bethesda HAS changed a lot of people. In 1999, it was acquired by Zenimax, and later that year, gamesas founder Chris Weaver left. Today, hardly anyone who was around and developed Arena and/or Daggerfall is still with the company.


That's true that they needn't be dumbed down. However, it's still worth noting that it required a LOT of work to port it; a good portion of it done prior when its graphics engine was painstakingly translated to work on the PS2's Graphics Synthesizer in order to port Unreal Tournament to that system.

It goes to show not all console games have to be dumbed down just because they're ported from the PC.

The issue isn't, I think, "dumbing down". The issue is the portability of the game. It would almost certainly require a total rewrite to get such an old game to the DS. The code probably wouldn't port.

Part of it is that the game would have to be compiled, instead, to run on the ARM architecture, as the ARM-9 CPU the DS uses is wildly different from the x86-based line that Arena was originally programmed for. I'd imagine that the memory architectures are completely different for the two.

Past that, the textures would likely need reformatting, though that's really no biggie. The DS obviously would have enough RAM for it; it's possibly enough for Daggerfall. And if not, the texture resolution could be cut to 32x32 from 64x64 to cut texture memory requirements by 75%; this wouldn't be as much of a biggie because the DS's resolution is 256x192 per screen instead of 320x200. I don't know if the DS supports any forms of texture compression, which would also cut VRAM requirements.

Past that, I'd actually wager the interface has enough controls for it; four face, two trigger, and two auxiliary buttons, a D-pad for movement, and then the touchscreen+stylus.

So possible, quite yes. However, it'd be an olympic feat if gamesas doesn't have the original source code. Even with it, they're talking a 2-3 month job for a few people; quite possibly not worth the effort.

Dammit, a quick glance at his first post made me think his dad had actually got it working on DS. I got all excited. <_<

Then I realised he didnt

Couldn't someone just port DosBOX to the DS? At that point, I assume you could just load it and whatever game you want onto a flash cart, assuming they're big enough to hold this stuff, and run with it*. Thee issues is handling a virtual keyboard, since
that would, obviously, need touchscreen functionality, but so would the main screen.

I guess a setup like PuzzleQuest, where pressing R flips the top and bottom screen, would work. Top screen is usually the keyboard layout, bottom screen is the game, and you can map commonly used keys to the face buttons. If you need to enter keyboard commands outside of that, just flip the screens or something. Not perfect at all, but it would forseeably work for a goodish amount of stuff.

Though, reprogramming Arena from scratch for the DS wouldn't be that hard, honestly.

* Biggest problem here would be with newer, CD based games, where you'd either need to mount an iso of the disc, or just copy all of the content of the disc to a folder or something given that the DS, obviously, lacks a CD drive. Maybe something involving the GBA slot could be worked out - put local files on that, and DISC files on the card**.

** Which is why Xeen needs an actual port. Or Isles of Terra and let's fix the bugs this time, kiddos.

The DS has nowhere near enough power to emulate something like Arena at a decent framerate. I would still like to see DOSBox on the DS, though

you *can* get memory cards for the DS, and if you can get linux on a DS, I wouldn't think a DOSbox would be too hard...

I dunno, actually... Given how efficient more recent versions of DOSBox are, if they made a verison that would be wholly native on the ARM-9, I wouldn't be surprised if Arena could be run at 20+ FPS.

Well, they had a port of SCUMMvm (which is a interpreter that handles and optimizes games using LucasArts' Scumm engine) on DS, so why can't they make a DOS/Arena engine interpreter and port it to the DS?