Arena on Steam (OK, not really!)

[SeaGtGruff]

Obviously, one of the nice things about Steam is that you can play a game from different computers without losing your place. I originally bought the PC versions of Morrowind and Oblivion, but recently bought the Steam versions of both games so I could play them on my desktop PC and continue playing on my laptop.

But what about Arena and the other games that must be played in DOSBox?

What I did was move my entire ARENA folder into my Dropbox folder, but you can use whichever cloud service you prefer. I did run into an issue once where I'd saved a game but didn't notice an error message about one of the files not being saved, which made that saved game unloadable. I had to load an older saved game and repeat a dungeon, which was no big deal. Since then I keep an eye out for error messages in the Command Prompt window whenever I save.

It's nice to be able to play Arena on my laptop in the living room while watching TV (or when traveling), then resume my game on my desktop PC in the bedroom.

[legoless]

You can get Arena on GOG. Might have some of the functionality you're looking for?

[SeaGtGruff]

I just assumed that since Arena must be played in DOSBox (at least on a recent version of Windows), that it can't be added to Steam. But having the save game files available in a folder in the cloud lets you play from any computer sort of like you were playing it on Steam.

[SeaGtGruff]

Some months ago I read that you can add DOSBox games to Steam, so this morning I finally watched a video tutorial on how to do that, and I now have Arena added to Steam on my desktop computer!

I haven't tried opening Steam on my laptop yet to see if it will automatically have Arena added to it, but if not then I can easily add it manually.

And since I've put Arena and its associated link, DOSBox configuration file, and Steam icon inside my Dropbox folder, I can play Arena on my desktop computer, then resume my game on my laptop, and then go back to playing it on my desktop computer, just as I can do in Steam with the other Elder Scrolls games.

[SeaGtGruff]

When I got on my laptop, Arena was already showing up in Steam-- as a game that I could stream from my desktop computer. I had to set it up on my laptop, and then Steam showed it twice on my laptop-- but only once on my desktop computer (go figure). I eventually figured out that the only way to keep Steam from displaying Arena twice was to disallow streaming from my desktop computer-- which isn't a problem, since I have no desire to do that, anyway. I also went ahead and disallowed streaming from my laptop, even though my desktop computer never showed Arena as being available to be streamed from my laptop.

So now I've got Arena running under DOSBox, launching from Steam, and kept up-to-date via the cloud by Dropbox. Maybe I'll put together a how-to document in case anyone else wants to try it, even though it's nothing that hasn't been explained elsewhere-- although perhaps not in the same combination or configuration that I'm using.