Diablo Backwards Compatibility Guide

[Slayer_X64]

I really do appreciate you taking the time and effort to outline all those possibilities for me. After reading the thread I was slowly coming to the conclusion that it was my GPU and/or drivers being the culprit, especially since this is not the first older game I've had issues with, but didn't want to experiment with downgrading drivers and such because I still play modern games like Battlefield 4 and changing out drivers would just be a hassle.

My CPU has always passed stress tests with flying colors and I regular play demanding games while livestreaming them, so unfortunately CPU stability was not an issue.

I made sure to disable DEP for Diablo as that was one of the first things I thought of, because of how I've locked my system down with EMET. Antivirus is MSE only, I've never found much use for anything stronger than that. Made an exception just to see. This got me hearing sound through what seemed to the be the intro video and I think I got to a main menu behind the black screen but then it crashed T_T

I will keep an eye on this thread daily, and will be more than willing to help you test other possibilities...for science!

In the end, I simply dug out my old XP disc and installed everything in VirtualBox. Honestly, this is probably the easiest and cleanest solution. It has the added benefit of giving Open Broadcaster Software a window to easily grab, which makes streaming the game way easier.

edit: I wonder if it might not be partly because my GPU and/or monitor simply can't display resolutions lower than 800x600. In addition to my very modern GTX 670, I also have quite a nice BenQ XL2420TX. This is probably contributing in some way =/
edit2: I'll be honest, I'm a tad lost with dxwnd, not really sure what settings I need to mess with to make it work with Diablo.

Well actually, at least, what the expected behavior of your system would be if you were to run something that was too LOW a resolution, would be one of two things:

1) it would be rendered at the requested resolution and then scaled up and stretched by your gpu to the nearest resolution.

2) it would be rendered at base resolution, but not stretched by your cpu, your monitor would switch to the lowest resolution and you would be playing the game with essentially a big black border on top, bottom, left and right.

I really cant imagine that it would crash because of that. that doesnt sound right.

One question - did you try spamming the executable? on windows 8 sometimes you can make it to the sound and then the game crashes, but if you spam the executable enough you can get lucky and bypass it.

I just wish I could see the situation first hand...I know I could fix it if I could replicate your system. Our system specs are actually pretty much identical minus the graphics card - I've got an AMD card.

Anyways I will continue to devise other methods of compatibility. So if you keep checking back here, I'm sure I'll have something new for you to try.

Out of curiosity, I want you to fiddle around a bit more with Method 4 for me if you can. Perhaps somewhere in there we can change something or do something to make it work somehow...thats how I got it running on AMD cards in the first place.

And yes, in the name of Computer Science! I am actually a first year CS student going to university, and I program my own personal projects on the side. Making a permanent solution to this problem however, is still beyond my programming abilities, which is why Im left using the computer knowledge that I have to try to fix these problems with tools that other people have made so far.

I will eventually write my on fix when I feel compitent enough, Or maybe I'll just re-write the entire game from scratch using SDL, making an exact replica of all the game mechanics, and I'll just make having a copy of the Diablo CD a requirement. But it will take time and knowledge that I just dont have at the moment.

Even so, it i good to have hobbies.