Diablo 2 Classic On The Go

Snakecharmed wrote: 7 months ago

Archive.org is such a valuable resource for so many research and archival projects. I'm glad they're providing access to ISOs of ancient software. There's nothing questionable legally with that because the license to use the software is what you pay for in the form of CD keys, not the physical media or files.

Your screenshot of the old game looks so much better than the legacy graphics in D2R. In comparison, the legacy graphics are oversaturated and smeared like a watercolor because they said to hell with upscaling. This is why I've never been able to play D2R with the legacy graphics beyond trying it out in the act towns. It looks like a blurry mess and the motion is awful.

Screenshot416.jpg

I understand this was a month ago, but I wanted to mention that the default legacy graphics settings are kinda whack in D2R in regards to the contrast (cranked all the way to max by default) and the selected emulation mode (Glide/Resurrected). After changing the contrast to the halfway point and the emulation to GDI (which I admit is probably a preference thing, I always preferred the pixelated look of DDraw rather than the smoothing/antialiasing of Glide or other renderers) I do think it looks significantly better. Not as good as actual LoD still but way better than the default settings.

The Zon has finished the game. I ended killing

Baal with an

Eaglehorn. The Buriza had higher damage but hit less often and was less effective than the lower damage but much faster

Eaglehorn in a number of areas including mob control, knocking out aerial annoyances, and leeching. D2 1.14d single player offline is much more difficult than D2r, because your build damage is much lower and the drop rate is also lower. I've decided I need more than 48 slots for storage and the use of the 1.10 Ladder runewords, so I am going to make those changes before starting a new build.

ShadowHeart, you really don't want to try this Hard Core.

I finally caved and enlarged my stash from 48 to 100 slots and added a text file that allows me to use patch 1.10 ladder runewords. The decision came while I was leveling a sorc and found a 4 socket

Flail in Nightmare Act2

Canyon of the Magi. There are so few base item drops in LOD 1.14d that a 4 OS

Flail was just hard to pass on, and when a

Vex dropped in NM

Halls of Vaught, the deal was sealed. I also made an Insight for my Merc in a lower level

War Scythe polearm but it works and it was all I had and have for now.

The Arreat Base!

A day of Rain gave me some time to get back to my offline game. So far I've added a Paladin, Sorceress and a Strafezon which are also my first three D2 builds. As I previously mentioned there are very few base item drops. For instance I have yet to find a

Monarch shield to make a Spirit for my sorc. So earlier when a plain +1

Grand Matron Bow dropped I decided to take a chance on adding sockets and it rolled 4. My starfezon needed a better bow than the

Eaglehorn and I had the runes so I decided to try and roll a Faith, and this is the result.

mhlg wrote: 6 months ago

A day of Rain gave me some time to get back to my offline game. So far I've added a Paladin, Sorceress and a Strafezon which are also my first three D2 builds. As I previously mentioned there are very few base item drops. For instance I have yet to find a

Monarch shield to make a Spirit for my sorc. So earlier when a plain +1

Grand Matron Bow dropped I decided to take a chance on adding sockets and it rolled 4. My starfezon needed a better bow than the

Eaglehorn and I had the runes so I decided to try and roll a Faith, and this is the result.

Faith.jpg

Congratulations,

The road journey has come to an end, and in a couple of days I will be back on my main rig.. I can't wait because a laptop just isn't a comparable replacement. It was good taking a little break from the game, but I did manage to squeeze in a few minutes and complete a couple of classic builds. LOD 1.14d reminded of how irritated Blizzard made everyone when they decided to introduce immunities. I think that was when a large number of people began to have negative views of Blizzard, but that's just my opinion. On the upside it also reminded me of making through end game without a Torch or Annihilius, but I did find a few Sojs and managed to get a couple. Below is a screenshot of my time away from D2.

I'm resurrecting this because even though Warlock is so hot right now, I have been trying to get original D2 to work without disks. Some internet searching brought me right back here.
I have Diablo 2 v1.03 installed on my laptop and it will play with the "Play" disc in my USB DVD drive.
I made an ISO file on my computer and mounted it so that I could try to play without the external drive and disc. However when I try to run the game, nothing happens. I used the shortcut to the game with the -w to force it to run in window mode. It is running in compatibility mode as an administrator, but I get nothing with a mounted ISO.

I was wondering if you had any pointers or could help me out.

beep-loading 25 year old Memory-beep

has to be mounted with "demon tools" (???)

Would guess your iso image creation just mirrored the normal data leaving out the hidden stuff where the copy protection sits. You can try making an image in bin/cue or mdf/mds format which should mirror everything on the disc.

You can also try mounting software that can emulate copy protection.

The latter I haven't tried but I know for a fact that a mounted mdf/mds image of D2/LoD worked for me back in the days.