• Archives

  • Categories:

Diablo 2 + wine success after 3 years!

Diablo 2 holds a special place in my heart. When I was living in upstate New York with a few roommates in 2000 I became hopelessly addicted to it like I never had any game before, or since. My computer was the only one in the house that could play it, I used to have people in my room at all hours of the day playing it – sometimes I’d even wake up in bed and find some of my male roomies in my room playing it! I wasn’t bothered by this, I was mad about the game, spent hours playing it, for a few months all me and my roomies did was sleep, work, eat and play D2. When the expansion pack was released, we headed to the 24 hour Wal-Mart to be the first in line to snatch up our copy. And yes, it even got so bad that one of my friends bought things for the game on ebay for us all. Sick? Sad? Sure, but we had tons of fun.

When I left New York my copies of the game came with me. A lot changed in my life in 2001, I moved in with an Aunt, and then down here to Philadelphia with Michael. He introduced me to Unreal Tournament, a game that got him into. In early 2002 I switched to Linux, further contributing to the dust collecting on my poor Diablo 2 cds.

Every year or so since 2003 I tried to install Diablo 2 with the Lord Of Destruction Expansion Pack in Linux with wine. I didn’t try too terribly hard, just set aside an afternoon to see how far I could get with an installation. It has mostly worked for a basic install, but because wine could not properly read the cdrom drive I always needed to go out and find the nocd crack. This meant braving warez sites, something I generally don’t like to do. Plus, warez sites rarely had the most-super-duper-up-to-date nocd patches, so you couldn’t get onto battle.net – BNet is what makes D2 so much fun!

And so it’s been. Each year I get a bit further in the install process. When I was sitting at my desk this afternoon looking for something to do, my D2 disks called to me.

I quickly stumbled upon old directions that hadn’t worked in the past, and then came to WineHQ.com’s Diablo II – Lord of Destruction 1.x page.

What works
Everything, including copy protection.

EVERYTHING? Surely this is too good to be true…

I gave it a shot on my Debian etch workstation with wine 0.9.11. After some false starts, I finally got it all loaded up and to my surprise IT ACTUALLY WORKS! EVEN WITH BATTLENET! AFTER THREE YEARS OF TRYING!!! GLEE!!! No cracks, no problems, just my copy of D2 playing nicely with wine in Debian.

Sadly, I’m not actually in the mood to play it now – HAH!