The Elder Scrolls: Arena (GOG)

Source and fixture boundary

The local fixture comes from the Internet Archive gog_collection item pinned in test/candidate-corpus/manifest.json. Its RAR is 81,068,818 bytes with SHA-1 aa8f357433ea5c07a9ebda4c6dd062b53348f57b; the contained GOG offline installer is setup_the_elder_scrolls_arena_1.07_(28043).exe, 81,068,584 bytes. GOG listed Arena for USD 0.00 when this corpus was verified, but the package remains proprietary and gitignored. Nothing here grants redistribution rights for the installer or extracted game.

Direct installer path

The original PE32 Inno wrapper was executed directly in Wine-Assembly, without host Wine. It extracted a 1,343,072-byte child and requested this exact command line:

/SL5="$10001,80468877,192512,C:\setup_the_elder_scrolls_arena_1.07_(28043).exe"

Running that child with the original installer mounted at the named C: path found two Wine-Assembly defects:

• Inno called VirtualQueryEx((HANDLE)-1, 0x00400000, ...); Wine-Assembly had VirtualQuery but no current-process VirtualQueryEx wrapper.
• The launcher stages up to 200 command-line bytes at raw WASM address 0x300. That range overlaps the low immutable-string block and changed the bytes at 0x36d from uxtheme.dll to part of /NORESTART. LoadLibraryW therefore returned the executable image base for the optional theming DLL, after which VCL called a null IsThemeActive pointer at installer VA 0x00439550.

VirtualQueryEx now delegates the current-process pseudo handle to VirtualQuery and rejects external handles. Extra command-line staging now lives in the documented free 256-byte region at 0x07f0a500. The wide uxtheme.dll check also uses a Boolean non-null predicate; WebAssembly's i32.and is bitwise, so directly ANDing a naturally even UTF-16 pointer with a successful 1 comparison incorrectly produces zero.

With --winver=win2k, the unchanged installer proceeds through the GOG wizard and extracts its custom UI assets. Full interpreted decompression is extremely slow: a bounded 300-second run retired 321,772 Win32 API calls and reached the two slideshow JPEGs, but had not reached the game payload. After proving that direct path, the existing local innoextract build extracted the same package for the runtime acceptance. This is a throughput workaround, not host Wine. The ignored extracted tree is about 117 MiB.

Bundled DOSBox runtime

The package contains the original 32-bit Windows DOSBOX/DOSBox.exe, version 0.74-2.1. test/configs/arena-wine-assembly.conf deliberately selects core=dynamic, mounts the extracted root as both a writable C: drive and a CD-ROM D: drive, then launches ACD from D: while setting ARENADATA=C:. Launching from C: is not equivalent: Arena prints TES: Arena can only be run from a CD-ROM drive and returns to the shell.

The bounded acceptance runs that Windows DOSBox inside Wine-Assembly, retains Program: ACD, and captures a rendered 640x400 game frame. The accepted frame has at least 50 colors, over 250,000 non-black pixels, and fewer than 5,000 black pixels. The two diagnosed DOS shell/error frames had only 9-10 colors and about 133,000 black pixels.

node test/test-arena-dosbox.js