Many of us are enjoying the recent release of Diablo III but some of us still love to play Diablo II Lord of Destruction, and with Windows 8, that can be a little problematic.
Diablo II Lord of Destruction is an outstanding game that became an instant classic when it was released on June 29th in North America. Even over a decade later, Diablo fans still play Diablo II LOD on Battle.net and in single player mode. However, the operating systems we use have changed quite dramatically over the years and with each new version usually comes a new set of problems for gamers who enjoy playing classic titles.
If you have attempted to play Diablo II LOD on Windows 8 you will notice many issues, including some serious lag. Here are a few steps you can take to make sure your Diablo II LOD experience in Windows 8 is just as good, if not better, than it was back in 2001.
This quick “how to” assumes that you have already installed and patched the latest version of Diablo II LOD on your system. If you need patch information you can obtain it through Blizzard’s official patch site.
Before launching the game, right click on the game’s shortcut and select “Properties”, then select the “Compatibility” tab.
Once on the Compatibility tab, select the following options:
- Check “Run this program in compatibility mode for” and set the value to “Windows XP SP 2/3”
- Check “Reduced Color Mode” and set to “16-bit (65536) Color”
- Check “Disable display scaling on high DPI settings”
- Optional “Run this program as administrator”
Once you dial in these settings click Apply and then OK.
The next step is crucial if you want to reduce or eliminate all of the glitching and lagging that is known to plague Diablo II LOD on Windows 8.
Obtain an 3DFX Glide Wrapper, this is a little application that will allow you to use the Glide interface with Diablo II LOD. I have found that GLIDE3-to-OpenGL Wrapper by Sven Labusch seems to work the best out of any I have tried so far.
Download the files from Sven’s site and read the “ReadMe.txt” file. This will contain the most current instructions for installing and setting up the wrapper. Be sure to re-run the video test after the wrapper is installed and set it to use Glide.
** Note: You Will Also Need to apply compatibility settings to run the Diablo II Video Test (D2VidTst.exe) * *
That’s it! Hopefully you will be successful in your attempts to get Diablo running smooth. Just follow the directions closely and have fun!