Revisiting Diablo

Last night I dusted out my Diablo Battlechest because I had an irresistible urge to visit Tristram, lurk in the creepy sixteen-level dungeons and catacombs to weed out demons, monsters, the undead and their bosses, and kit myself out in some fancy gear. (Oh, all right, Niklas, all I wanted was to point and click my way to momentary happiness!)

Unfortunately, Diablo, which was released about 17 years ago, is a bit, well, let’s just say, too hot for present-day computers to handle. The Mac installer, built for the Classic (OS 9) environment isn’t even recognised on my system. I did manage to install it on Windows 7, but even with the settings turned down, it was too pixelated to be of any use.

Thus thwarted, I moved on to Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. The Mac installers being PowerPC only, once again I turned to Windows. However, as any Diablo fan knows, the second instalment of the series, intriguing though it is, can get somewhat tedious, especially trawling through unending forests, deserts, dungeons and what not to gain experience. There are some pretty challenging quests thrown in and the character building is quite fascinating, but it does get tedious playing the first few parts again and again and again.

I’m not done with trying to get Diablo to work yet. I’m now off to try a WINE-based emulator called PlayOnMac. If it does, I get to spend the day in hack-and-slash hell.

~PD

UPDATE: Diablo worked pretty well on Windows 7 after I installed the game patch and also a registry key to play in compatibility mode, both available on Battle.Net. I haven’t managed to get it to work on Mac OS Lion yet, but it is possible with PlayOnMac. There’s an excellent how-to here, covering Windows, Mac and Linux, if anyone’s interested.