I was shocked to see that The Elder Scrolls 2 isn't freeware and even more shocked to see that Bethesda doesn't sell it in any form. Is there anywhere I can get this game besides paying $50 on eBay?

You could try Amazon or your local pawn shop, you might get lucky. I can't understand why Bethesda won't start selling it again for a low price, or even put it on steam(maybe DosBox is the problem). The only people making a killing from Daggerfall are the Ebay sellers.

I think it's because they'd have to provide some sort of technical support if they did that. Just pointing the people to DosBox and say 'good luck' is probably not enough and they'd constantly get e-mails from people who are asking them how to get the game to work.

Yeah you're right. Its a pity about the Technical support because people that would like to try Daggerfall can only find it at one or two places if they are lucky, then they have to pay high prices by sellers who know how much its worth.

Set aside 50USD, and go to ebay. I highly recommend playing the demos first.

Bethesda should just start selling it on Steam and distribute it with a customised DosBox conf. id and several other publishers got away with it for their legacy games.

True. The only problem is that many older games, especially intricate ones such as Daggerfall, are painfully confusing if one does not have the original manual - and I think Bethesda had something against releasing a PDF manual. Even if they didn't, well, many of id's games on Steam did NOT come with the manuals even though you can just nab them at replacementdocs.com in a matter of moments. Tsk tsk, lazy you guys.

Unfortunately many people wouldn't be smart enough to look for the manuals on their own, so we'd get more silly question threads here. I think we have enough of those here, enough to conflict with any real hardcoe Arena/Daggerfall discussion, at least. :\

They released Arena's manual on PDF IIRC. And I actually managed to get into both Arena and Daggerfall without a manual! Though that was a painfully slow process...

Didn't Bethesda outlaw redistribution of their manuals? At least that's what replacementdocs.com saith. I could've sworn the download of Arena off their site had the manual, but maybe I imagined it.

That is true. They requested that their manuals be removed from ReplacementDocs, even the Arena manual. There is no manual with the Arena download, just a short doc that gives the absolute basics.

Um, why would they outlaw their own redistribution of their own manuals? That's would be... dumb. :huh:

Redistribution of copyrighted material is illegal. That was why Beth asked them NOT to host them.

Arena was released as freeware recently, so, I don't quite understand why they wouldn't release the manual with it, unless someone else holds the copyright?? No clue there.

Beth won't re-release Daggerfall, as, even fully patched up it was chock full of fatal errors. My personal favorite was: "The game has encountered an error, you must reinstall to correct this." Such fun we have for you..... I had it running in compatibility mode on XP, without using DOSBox, but, it was still just as buggy, and crash prone as ever... Don't expect to see it released anytime soon.......

Running on XP is a tempt with fate, its worse on there then it ever was on older OSes. With DOSBox I haven't had a crash in years, to be brutally honest its almost like it was the OS that was buggy, and not the game.

You should not try to run Daggerfall on XP without using DOSBox. With DOSBox it runs pretty well and does not crash a lot (on my computer it does not crash at all). It still has bugs, but as usual with the last patch it's really playable and enjoyable.

Small note: don't run the game using 'dagger.exe', instead run it using the command 'fall.exe z.cfg'. With this it is far more stable.

You're asking for trouble running daggerfall on XP. I personally can't remember the last time DF crashed whith DosBox, but I have had a couple of crashes on my older comp, nothing major though.

On DOSBox, fully patched it's not too bad, but two bugs drive me INSANE:

-All the usual ways of falling into the void. I don't even feel secure climbing walls in this regard.
-Loading your game if you're not on the menu (as in, loading it if you didn't just die or start DF) seems to have like a 25% chance of freezing and closing DOSBox without error. It's annoying.

Keep an eye out. I happened to find one on ebay for $25 last night... happily snapped it up and am awaiting for my first copy of daggerfall

Yeah, I just downloaded and installed it to check it, but couldn't find it. :shrug: