Elder Scrolls Arena On The Gp2x???

[Haze]

Now that my problems from yesterday have been sorted out and my GP2X is on the way to the right house I thought I would ask, has anyone tried getting Elder Scrolls Arena running on the GP2X? Bethesda made it freely available ages ago, is it possible?

 

[Radek]

Now that my problems from yesterday have been sorted out and my GP2X is on the way to the right house I thought I would ask, has anyone tried getting Elder Scrolls Arena running on the GP2X? Bethesda made it freely available ages ago, is it possible?

Via DOSBOX it should run albeit slowly. If there are sources available then a port should be possible.

 

[Magnulus]

I somehow doubt it's available other than illegally. Might be, though. I have no idea. I've been putting off playing it for no particular reason, so getting it full-speed on the GP2X would be rather welcome.

 

[yalborap]

I somehow doubt it's available other than illegally. Might be, though. I have no idea. I've been putting off playing it for no particular reason, so getting it full-speed on the GP2X would be rather welcome.

Do you mean the source, or the actual game?

Because bethesda released it legally for their tenth anniversary a while back, but I can't find any source code download.

 

[michaeljustman]

Isn't it freely available as freeware. I'm not sure that they released the source code, so a port wouldn't be possible, right?

 

[Radek]

Isn't it freely available as freeware. I'm not sure that they released the source code, so a port wouldn't be possible, right?

Yes because doing an interpreter would be close to impossible for such complicated game.

There are lots excellent PC DOS games and... no higher perfomance emulator for them. Is really the x86 hardware that hard to emulate? VGA thought had some capabilities it was used by most time as dumb framebuffer only. The sound was also software based and midi was used for music. So it's matter of fast x86 interpreter to have good PC DOS emulator. Actually as x86 has less registers than Arm it's advantageous doing it quickly.

20-25MHz 386 level PC should be entirely possible even without dynamic recompilation imho.

 

[Tobriand]

I think it's something that, for whatever reason, no-one seems intent on getting going though. Maybe those who feel most nostalgic for early PC games are non-coders.

In any event, I can say two things for certain. Firstly, there isn't any source. There's a rumour that Bethesda lost it, but that is just a rumour. In any event, when I emailed them about it, the response was simple.

"We do not accept ideas from fans"

So there we go. Possibly to avoid copyright entanglement, I don't know. So without x86 emulation it ain't gonna happen.

 

[Magnulus]

Yeah, I meant as in the source. I have the freeware lying on my usb stub (Too tiny to be a stick.) and I fully intend to play it one of these days...

 

[rmatheso]

DosBox is pretty slow right now. Stuff like Duke Nukem 1 runs good with frameskip 2 on. Halloween Harry is too slow right now.

Hopefully, they'll release an optimized port.

 

[tshroom]

The dos box seems like it would be one of the better emulators to try and optimize. Most old PC games are starting to be released as freeware and the specs they require to run are pathetic. What will it take for us to convince a little team to tweak the hell out of a dos emu?

 

[Jaguarandine]

Don't forget about QEMU with WINE or DOSEMU Although I admit it would probably take more work to get going.

 

[icurafu]

OK, I did post a topic about this. And I did get an larger responce from the developers.

They don't want to give about their IP. Maybe they are considering it's use somewhere else. They seemed to use it a lot in an nGage version of elder scrolls.

They gave me a more serious reply because I offered to port it. (without the required resouce files.)

You're best bet is dosbox then.