Hi,

is there an arena graphic overhaul available (for example like for Duke Nukem the Duke Nukem High Resolution Pack)????

The Graphic looks cool when I played it the first time 1997 on my old DOS-PC, but a little bit weird on the more modern systems.

Lestat

No, because Bethesda would never have allowed it.

What makes you say that? Lots of graphic overhauls has been released for both Morrowind and Oblivion.

Thanks,

O.k., if you're right (and god, I hope you're not)...than I have to look for an old 386 Dos Veteran plus original screen for a few dollars, cause playin Arena on a quad core and widescreen HD Monitor feels sometimes like a torture and the DOS-Box Window mode is not really an option.

Cheers,

Lestat

Edit: Sorry, doublepost

You could always enable a graphics filter in DOSBox. Super2xsai is the one I tend to employ most for DOS games.

His complaint seems to be more about the aspect ratio. I see three possible solutions to that -- none of which involve resurrecting ancient computers:

• See if the monitor has a feature to correctly display fullscreen apps that aren't at a 16:10 resolution (will look correct and have black bars on the side).
  
• Plug in a different screen to play Arena. Even plugging in a second screen and moving the game to that one would work nicely.
  
• Play in a window and make sure aspect correction is turned on in the DOSbox config. I found Daggerfall didn't look right at all without that setting turned on. I also increased the resolution of the window to 1280x960.

The results of any of those should be graphically very close to playing on a 386 but without the hassle and (minimal) expense. Settings like the scalers in DOSbox can be adjusted to taste.

It's pretty easy to set up the proper aspect ratio in dosbox.conf.

Change these settings:
fullresolution=(whatever resolution your monitor is; for me this is 1280x800)
output=opengl OR ddraw; surface will not set the aspect ratio
Then go down to [render] and change:
aspect=true

I'm glad the DOSBox team wrote this in, because nVidia sure doesn't care if their drivers do this automatically.

Thanks,

now it looks much better :clap:

Cool! I never discovered it would do that if the resolution was set correctly.

Am I the only one who has assumed that the OP is referring to texture replacers? Such a thing can't be done. A while back, there was an attempt to create an OpenGL sourceport of Arena (named "ArenaXP", the first demo is still on the TESNexus). It allowed you to extract sounds, sprites, textures, almost everything, but it as far as I know, the ability to recompile the formats once they're extracted into working form can't be done.

I did, but once someone brought up the fact that his screen was probably stretched, that made a bit more sense to me. I still wish Stanza (I think that was his name) would've finished that project. He was uncovering some pretty interesting things, such as removable clothing (no pun intended...).

Arena strikes me as one of those games that's so dated a graphic overhaul really couldn't do much, anyway, save for maybe running in a higher resolution. New textures, 3d models, and shader effects would be lost on something as simple as Arena and are much better suited to the later games.

Just so you know, 320x200 is a 16:10 resolution.

Yeah, if the pixels are square.

However, back in the DOS days this wasn't the case. While the vast majority of DOS games use 320x200 they were made for a 4:3 monitor, meaning that the pixels weren't square but tall rectangles.

I probably should have brought that up. Games with default resolutions on 320x200 sometimes get ported to
Windows and are displayed in a little window with square pixels. Same for a few that ran at 640x400. Doom and Quake are bad for that.

But there are amazing graphic overhauls available for Doom 1+2 and Quake I.

I'm really sorry that no one made such stuff for Arena yet...I'm just do modding for TES3 and a little bit TES4...I have no idea how to modify old 64 files or other DOS stuff. I've even found no tool to open them for editing.

There is no tool to edit them. Arena is nigh-impossible to mod. ArenaXP could decipher most of the file formats, but not import modified versions. If you want to mod old Elder Scrolls games, I suggest waiting until http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/ gets finished, which will open up a plethora of modding opportunities ranging from graphic replacers to esp-style content addons.

Also, yes, 4:3 aspect ratios were used back then despite the 320x200 resolution. This causes a discrepancy when running on today's monitors, although many Source Ports for DOOM will fix that. See http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Aspect_ratio.

DOSBox has a setting in dosbox.conf to fix the aspect ratio problem (just set it to aspect=true).

And somebody pointed out here this only works correctly in fullscreen mode if "fullresolution" is set to be the same as the monitor.

That is true, but good luck explaining that to Windows XP.

You don't need to deal with XP. Just let DOSBox handle it

Are you sure about fullresolution? I never used it and didn't have a problem with the aspect ratio (once I set aspect=true). Then again I had set my video driver settings to "keep aspect ratio" as well, so that may be it.