No sound in TES:Arena under DOSBox

dosboxthe-elder-scrolls-arenawindows 7

Since this is my first venture involving a manual install of DOSBox, I'm not quite sure if the issue is with the DOSBox install itself, or with the game. Either way, I currently seem to have no sound or music while playing The Elder Scrolls: Arena under DOSBox on my laptop.

The entire introduction sequence is silent, all the way up to the stats selection screen. I've not tested it any further yet, but I would really have expected to hear something by now if it was working.

I'm pretty sure I've covered all relevant system specs below. Is there something configured wrong here, that I'm missing? Or is the problem deeper than this? What utilities or methods are available to help troubleshoot this?

Also, I am aware that there is a pre-packaged 1.07 version available. However, I would like to try getting this one running for awhile before I upgrade.

System Configuration:

  • OS: Windows 7 x64 SP1
  • DOSBox Version: 0.74
  • TES Arena Version: 1.06 (Downloaded from http://www.elderscrolls.com/arena)
  • Host System Sound Drivers:
    • AMD High Definition Audio Device
    • SoundMAX Integrated Digital HD Audio
  • Guest System Sound Configuration:
[midi]

mpu401=intelligent
mididevice=default
midiconfig=

[sblaster]

sbtype=sb16
sbbase=220
irq=7
dma=1
hdma=5
sbmixer=true
oplmode=auto
oplemu=default
oplrate=44100

[gus]

gus=false
gusrate=44100
gusbase=240
gusirq=5
gusdma=3
ultradir=C:\ULTRASND

[speaker]

pcspeaker=true
pcrate=44100
tandy=auto
tandyrate=44100
disney=true
  • Guest System AUTOEXEC:
[autoexec]

@echo off
MOUNT C D:\DOSBox\Root\
CLS
CD \Games\TESArena
A.EXE
  • Sound Configuration in INSTALL for TES: Arena:
SOUND: Sound Blaster or SB16 (or compatible) - IO:220 IRQ:7 DMA:1
MUSIC: Sound Blaster or SB16 (or compatible) - IO:220 IRQ:7 DMA:1

Best Answer

TL;DR: Make sure you're running ARENA.BAT to start the game.

This turned out to be such an RTFM issue, I nearly want to shoot myself.

All along the way during the install and run of the game, I'd been tweaking the instructions from Bethesda just a bit to suit my preferred system setup and to work around some issues I encountered. After running into a problem in the step where it tells me to run INSTALL.EXE on the host machine, (which will fail on an x64 system - so, you need to run it from DOSBox) I made the mistake of beginning to think I was smarter than Bethesda.

So, when it came time to run C:\Arena\Arena I instead ran dir C:\Games\TESArena\*.exe to see if there even was an Arena executable in my custom install folder for the game. At this point, the closest thing to Arena that I saw was A.EXE. Little did I realize at the time that the manual was referring to an Arena.BAT, which is a Batch file that runs A.EXE and passes along parameters to configure the sound devices as chosen in INSTALL.EXE. So, of course the game will work if you run A.EXE directly - it just won't know how to (and, therefore, just won't) handle sound.

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