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A while ago I realised that using Gravis Ultrasound emulation in DOSBox can produce superior sound quality, and since Arena supports GUS for sound and music, I set off to try it out.

The game is known to be very demanding of base memory, and a user in another forum reported that he had to drop GUS for SB because of frequent Insufficient Base Memory crashes.

I tried out several DOSBox builds and setups, and I believe to have achieved more or less stable performance with GUS using DOSBox ECE. I have a build from 29 January this year (r4426), and have not tested the game with newer builds, but I'd like to think they would work fine too.

I downloaded GUS patches/software from here and installed them in DOSBox with this guide. The Arena version I'm using is the freeware 1.06 floppy release from Bethesda.

The game ins installed into C:\ARENA directory on the mounted C: drive. I created the following batch file to start it from the root:

A few notes on these settings:

• cpu cycles=max 100%% limit 21000 will cap cycles at 21000 -- this seems like a good value to play on max detail settings, not too fast and not too slow
• I tried out the possible CPU core values, and simple gives better performance than normal, while I did not like dynamic because it produced clicking noises with sound playback sometimes
• I have no proof that emm386 emulation yields an improvement, but this seemed like a good choice and it appears to work fine. Note that he official DOSBox 0.74-3 release does not support this option

I also use a GLSL shader that imitates a CRT screen called crt-lottes-fast.subtle+gain.glsl which I got from here.

I played around with various settings and concluded that dynamic core is probably a better choice.

I've also tested Arena with S3 VBE/Core 2.0 and S3 SpeedUp. Initially I was afraid that loading these TSRs would result in immediate Insufficient Base Memory errors, but no, seems to work fine overall.

S3 VBE/Core 2.0 and S3 SpeedUp are confirmed to speed up the frame rate (a bit) in VGA and VESA modes in DOSBox. You can get these utilities here.

Here's the contents of my current ARENA.BAT, located in the root directory of the emulated C: drive in DOSBox (I'm using DOSBox ECE):

The 23880 cycles part is DOSBox-X's suggested value for a 486DX2 66 MHz.