arrrghh I give up - Classic D, Win XP, Router

[LochnarITB]

I decided to try some classic Diablo on my relatively new laptop. I am running Windows XP Home, Zone Alarm, and a Microsoft Wireless Base Station hooked to a Cisco dsl router. I have patched Diablo to 1.09b.

The problem: I cannot connect to battle.net. I have no problem connecting Diablo II to battle.net but Diablo dies at "querying gateway". When I cancel, it crashes so hard that I eventually have to do a hard reset to get rid of the remaining process. In my wireless base station, I have set all the ports that the battle.net support page and other messages indicate, 6112-6119 UDP and TCP in and out. I even threw in 4000 TCP in and out since D2 uses that port. I have attempted to run through a virtual dmz for this machine. I have checked the registry and found the proper gateways listed. I have given full permissions to diablo.exe, both in and out, for Zone Alarm. I have tried turning Zone Alarm off completely. I have tried running in both Win95 and WinNT compatibility modes. No luck.

Any suggestions? It seems like I am forgetting something that had to be done previously with the various patches. I am to the point where figuring out the problem is no longer fun. I usually enjoy getting things to work on these oh so frustrating machines too. I already had one huge problem with connectivity on this machine earlier this week. (I won't go into details as the solution turned out to be embarrassingly easy after wasting most of a day and finally a full hour on the phone with a tech.) I just don't need this much frustration again so soon. Diablo CD's and laptop computers tend not to appreciate being thrown against walls. :o

Oh yeah, the game does work playing single or multiplayer as long as I don't try connecting to battle.net.

Any and all help greatly appreciated!

[LochnarITB]

Death by CD!

I'm having problems with this now when I am playing (multi with direct cable). As soon as a new sound needs to load the game freezes while my wonky slot load cd/dvd drive tries to spin up the cd. Of course, this is often followed by AAAHHHHH and the red screen o' death. I have not been able to find any system setting to keep the drive spinning and I have tried leaving the music on in an attempt to keep it spinning. I thought I remembered copying the diabdat.mpq file to the hard drive but that didn't help, even after changing registry entries for diablo to point to the install directory rather than the cd/dvd drive.

Any suggestions? I am finding that I am enjoying being back to the simple joy of classic D and I would like to end this frustration.

[the Langolier]

This happens to me all the time! Before I take on Laz, I always have to remove and replace my armor as I am walking to get it spinning. If you can anticipate it, just remember that as it's frozen you can still control yourself. Switch to teleport and get yourself out of there, hopefully it will minimize the danger. Oh yea, if anyone you are playing with dies, it's pretty much a garuntee that you'll die too - that's always fun.

On a side note, does anyone know how to fix that. I've downloaded daemons tools and mounted an image of the Diablo CD, but it doesn't work. Everytime I start Diablo it still gives me the error that there is no CD in the drive.

[Yogi_Baar]

I don't know Daemon tools, but somehow I doubt that it takes over the real CD drive letter. If it gets a new drive letter assigned, you should edit the registry so that it points onto the new drive.

My two stotins.

[Nystul]

Yep. Search your registry for "DiabloCD" and make the appropriate change. Or if you are the type that doesn't touch registry with a ten foot pole, you could uninstall Diablo and reinstall it off the mounted CD image. The registry edit should be much simpler in this case though.