i used to play this so much on my horrible school laptop that the trackpad ended up giving me friction burns

you're going to have to dig around in the DOSBox config to get it working halfway decently (there's a bunch of guides available which touch on specific settings, but your mileage may vary) and the arena remapped mod comes HIGHLY recommended

it's overall a pretty fun dungeon crawler which has aged a fair bit, but for free it can't hurt to try!

hoping for OpenTESArena to release sometime before i die

The first game in the series, and the first glimpse of Tamriel, although Arena is 30 years old it's still really fun. Large and complex dungeons, a variety of enemies, both melee fighters and spell casters of all kinds, and the most important part, the spellmaker, which allows for interesting spells like breaking through freaking walls. All you need is a lot of patience, because the game is long and the dungeons maze like.

Some important info to make things less confusing:

1. Shift+m to open the world map and fast travel ( click a town, then click the middle icon in the lower left corner)
2. Shift+j to jump forward( can jump over lava, or on raised platforms and it's crucial at a certain point in the game)
3. Ask NPCs in order to find needed locations, from inns, stores to quest locations.

My suggestion would be to pick a spell caster, since the spellmaker is the most interesting mechanic in the game and juggling through different spells in combat is really fun.

If playing on Linux, in order to make music work I installed Timidity++ with the FluidR3 soundfront(instructions in 3rd comment : https://steamcommunity.com/app/410710/discussions/0/1742226629876612529/). There's probably a version for Windows, too, in case music doesn't work.

Old American fantasy art is crazy because it looks like it was drawn by a horny teenager and it most likely was!