Diablo 1 + Vista 64

[Fgsd]

Little background...

1) Diablo 2 works fine once I disable Aero. With Aero on, however, I get some characters in the upper left corner of my screen, and nothing more. The screen doesn't even go black. Starcraft functions perfectly with Aero on, but I use Chaoslauncher to get it to window mode because otherwise it conflicts with Xfire and my screen has black lines all over it.

2) I can't patch D1.
I get some error about ui_art/special.pcx not being found.


When I load D1, the screen stays black. I'm sure if I left it for an hour, it wouldn't change. If Aero is off, my CPU usage hovers between 0 and 3%. This is just normal background activity. With Aero off, core 0 (1) stays at 100%, but nothing else is noticeably different than with Aero on. I guess Aero causes D1 to crash immediately. My optical drive is constantly working throughout all this. It sounds VERY weird, making a high pitched sound when spinning. No other disc I own does this, even my horribly beat up LoD disc (my friend ran a chair over it years ago). The D1 disc looks pristine (like all my discs people haven't wrecked), but the drive sounds like it's having real trouble reading it.

Not dualbooting XP since I don't have problems with any other apps.


Edit:
I should add that D2 is REALLLLY laggy. I'm talking like 8-15 fps 50% of the time. I have a e6750 @ 3.4, 4 GB DDR2, and an 8800GT. I get better FPS in Crysis maxed. When I was on XP 32 bit with the same computer (2 GB RAM and stock speeds, but close enough), D2 ran okay. It was 25 fps most of the time, but often had a huge number of skipped frames. Honestly it was still a lot slower than my old 2500+/9600XT/XP box and even my Duron 800/GF2MX/WinME that I played D2 on when I was really active. Basically the faster my computer gets, the worse D2 seems to run. This is offline; I forget what my Bnet account was called. ILILLILILILII or something haha. Yes, I know 25 fps is the max. I'm not even getting that most of the time.

[Flux]

and you can't create multiplayer characters at all. I suppose it's inevitable that some elements of games from 1996 and 2000 won't work on and OS made in 2008, but it's still annoying.

[The Sandcat]

I would put XP on the machine .Vista is rubbish.
One thing that still puzzles me is why anyone would run a game in a window? Pressing the window button als switches you to the desktop. Can anyone enlighten me?

[Coleridge]

One thing that still puzzles me is why anyone would run a game in a window? Pressing the window button als switches you to the desktop. Can anyone enlighten me?

Probably because they want to run the game in the original resolution (640x480 is max resolution for classic diablo) rather then in full screen since the game would then look blurry and weird if you have a widescreen monitor.

[Flux]

D1 actually looks pretty good on a widescreen. The sides of the screen are black/letterbox style, but the graphics aren't bad stretched out. I'm on a 24" running in 1920x1200 and it looks fine. Obviously it's not exactly crystal clear with the big pixels, but it's not painful to the eye.

Then again I've always preferred oldstyle 2d to 3d graphics, so maybe it's just me.

[Fgsd]

I would put XP on the machine .Vista is rubbish.
One thing that still puzzles me is why anyone would run a game in a window? Pressing the window button als switches you to the desktop. Can anyone enlighten me?

Ok, first, XP is almost 9 years old. I don't want to run a 9 year old OS anymore, especially when the rest of my games function fine. Vista works fine for me. Diablo 1 is the problem, not Vista. The D1 patch for Vista does not work properly. I am not running an old OS, which is soon to be 2 generations old, just so I can play Diablo 1.

Second, ugh wow ignorance.

Let's start with the fact that most people disable the Windows key for that very reason. Alt tab is the official method for switching between programs; sometimes when a window loses focus to another window/popup (which is what happens when you use the Windows key to leave full screen), that window will freeze up or glitch out. Happens often with older games which do not have an official windowed mode, like D1/Starcraft. Well, I've never even managed to get D1 to run, so I'm not sure if you can run it in a window even.:/

Now let's talk about the delay when switching resolutions. If you're in fullscreen at a resolution and color depth other than your desktop's, you'll have to wait while your monitor adjusts itself. This takes a few seconds and is extremely irritating when you're alt tabbing frequently. It's also bad for your monitor, especially LCDs. One of the main factors in determining an LCD's longevity is how often the backlight is power cycled. Actually, I should say the longevity of a fluorescent bulb, as that's what the backlight on most LCDs is. Power cycling a fluorescent bulb is bad for it, and increases wear each time you do it. I try to only turn my LCD off when I know I'm going to be afk for more than 15-20 minutes (I try not to let Windows' power management turn it off, as this entails several power cycles for the bulb while the monitor's searching for a signal). When I boot up, I leave my monitor off until the desktop is loaded, because the resolution is changed several times during start up. However, I can't get around resolution changes, which is why I run the only game (SC) that can't run at my monitor's native res in a window. An older nVidia driver version seemed to let me change scaling options so the video card would do the scaling for my monitor, but it seems this feature doesn't function anymore. It was great when it did work, because resolution changes would occur extremely quickly, and with the backlight still on. Anyway, I believe this is a big reason why my monitor, despite being 2.5 years old, has not noticeably dimmed.

Finally, convenience. When I'm playing SC, well, let's just say it's hard finding a good game to play. I'm not picky, but people play retarded games now. I should point out I only play UMS; I'm not an RTS fan really. With window mode, I can pin Starcraft on top of other windows, like my email, Internet, or media player, and then drag it into a corner where the game names are visible, and wait until something good comes along. It's also nice to be able to quickly switch between windows without blocking everything out by going back to full screen. I'll admit Chaoslauncher's scaling is literally take every pixel and add 3 identical pixels next to it, but this is bloody Starcraft! Scaling can be better than CL's, but it can't, ever, add detail that isn't there.







So does anybody have any ideas on how to get D1 running? I saw the disc in a pile and remembered my post here.:P

[Lanthanide]

I've got Vista 64 and had a few minor problems running it, but not much. The first problem is this laptop has execute prevention stuff on it that stops 'bad' programs from executing in a certain manner. When this happened, Vista popped up an error message about it that included a link to the help, which had full instructions (including quick-links to the settings screen) on how to add an exception for Diablo so it would run. I had to do this for the patch program as well (bnupdate in the Diablo folder, rather than patch itself) to get it to apply, but otherwise it was easy.

Occasionally when I run it using the quick-start link in the start menu the colours go screwing - first noticable on the Blizzard logo having white pixelly blocks around it, the menu looks fine but when you get into the game parts of it are all rainbow coloured. The fix for this seems to be to run the diablo.exe file directly from windows explorer, and it works fine.

I also haven't had any problem creating multiplayer characters. When I try and do IPX it disallows it, presumably because Vista doesn't have IPX installed by default. But if I select Direct Connection I can create a character without a problem.

[Lanthanide]

Ok, I've upgraded my computer to Windows 7, and Diablo works on that too. I've found that I get the colour corruption problem pretty much every time I start it, but using properties on diablo.exe and selecting 256 colours forces it to correct itself. Annoyingly Windows 7 nags me about the resolution not being appropriate for my monitor every time I quit the game, even if I specify that it should work at 640x480 - silly.

I worked out why you can't create multiplayer characters in Vista with Hellfire, whereas Diablo works fine. I'm using Diablo 1.09, where multiplayer characters are saved in the Diablo game directory. In 1.07 and earlier, multiplayer characters are saved in the Windows directory. The windows directory is protected in Vista, so it is preventing files being created there. Hellfire is equivalent to 1.04 Diablo (Flux says 1.06 somewhere?), so it too tries to create multiplayer characters in the Windows folder, which Vista will prevent.

It might be possible to work around this if you specify the game to run as an Administrator, and you could try the compatibility modes also, but I don't have much hope.

Also the thing I said above about having to add an exception for execution prevention, that is because I had security addons installed on my laptop - so for most users this probably won't be an issue.