cRPG: Running Diablo 1 on Windows 7

There's a fair amount of scattered, occasionally-conflicting information about running Diablo 1 (the first Diablo game) under Windows 7. (If you found this post, you've probably already seen some of this info.) Here are my experiences.

Out of the Box:
Diablo 1 will install and run under Windows 7. However, the original unpatched version of the game stores multiplayer character files in the WINDOWS directory. This means you have to run the game as Administrator. (Running the game from the CD automatically prompts you to do this.) If you don't, you won't be able to create a new multiplayer character or see any of the multiplayer characters you created during previous sessions. (I haven't messed with single player.)

Connecting to Battle.net results in a long pause with the message "Searching for the fastest Battle.net server...", which eventually times out after about 1 minute with a "Could not connect" error message.

It is also not possible to play multiplayer across a LAN using IPX because Windows 7 no longer supports IPX. I installed Windows XP Mode with Virtual PC. While this allows for IPX, it is not a solution because DirectX will not work under XP Mode. This means the game won't even start under virtual XP.

IPXWrapper:
Instead, I went back to Windows 7 and used IPXWrapper. You just need to copy the 3 provided .dll files into your Diablo directory to do this. (This code seems safe. I skimmed the source, which is well-formatted, and I didn't notice anything obviously strange. I haven't had any strange new processes or network connections made since running it, either.)

I was trying to play Diablo between a Windows 7 and a Windows XP machine. Note that IPXWrapper is tunneling IPX over UDP, so you can't play using IPXWrapper with a machine that is natively running IPX. All the machines involved need to be using IPXWrapper. But using IPXWrapper is actually easier than installing and configuring IPX on Windows XP anyway, so this is not a hardship once you know about it.

Patching:
Having to run Diablo as Administrator annoyed me somewhat. I was also curious if I could get Battle.net to work. (It is no longer listed even on the Battle.net Classic site).

Installing the latest patch to 1.09 means Diablo will now save multiplayer characters in the diablo/ game directory. Thus, running as Administrator is no longer required. Also, I could now connect to a Battle.net server. (I did not bother actually creating an account and logging on, though.)

Bad/Broken Colors:
Patching breaks the color palette, though. This is obvious in the opening Blizzard animation and in the game itself (though the pre-game menus look fine). Some have reported luck with the Compatibility settings, but none of the combos I tried worked for me. (For example, setting the mode to Win98 or earlier meant the game couldn't find the CD-ROM anymore.)

The weird trick some have reported of opening the Windows Screen Resolution settings window and leaving it open in the background also did not fix this for me.

(2014-06 Update: The explorer-based fix below no longer works on my system. However, see Mary's comment on this post about a simple registry fix from Blizzard that solves this problem.)

What did work was: start Diablo, Alt-Tab and open the system Task Manager, and kill explorer.exe. Then Alt-Tab back to a correctly-colored Diablo. (Weird, I know.) When you're done with the game, you can return to the task manager and File -> New Task (Run...) -> explorer.exe again to bring back your task bar, etc.

As reported elsewhere, you can automate all this with a simple batch file. Save the following into a file named diablo.bat in your Diablo game directory:

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
diablo.exe
pause
start explorer.exe

You can now change your start menu shortcut to point to diablo.bat instead of diable.exe. You just have to hit any key in the console window after you quit Diablo bring back explorer. (Annoying side-effect: this closes any open Windows Explorer windows too.)

All told, unless you are running into some of the game bugs fixed by the patch or want Battle.net access, it's probably easier to just set the original unpatched version to run with Administrator priviledges. Also, if you do patch, all games must be patched to the same level to play over IPX.

On a related sidenote, Diablo 2 runs fine for me out of the box under Windows 7.

cRPGs: The best solo play solution?

It's been a long time. I spent the summer finishing up my dissertation, and then I started another degree in the fall. The combination of teaching, taking classes, and trying to do research consumed me. I haven't had any time for gaming in months--and that sucks.

The last project I worked on during the summer was a playing-card-based dungeon-generation system. The idea is to quickly generate rooms, encounters, features, etc. I've been browsing a few other card-based approaches, and even found a Sudoku-based approach.

My idea here is that a gaming/generation system that allows for solo-play would also allow for GM-less group-play. But the trick here is balancing random generation with pre-stacking the deck and interpreting the results. Too much randomness sucks, producing a stale or discordant dungeon experience without a decent story behind it. Too much interpretation requires the player(s) to be rather schizophrenic, switching between omniscient DM and world-ignorant character.

So what's the best blend here for solo play?

Random generation: Dungeon-generation tables have been around for decades, and now numerous online apps will do all the tedious rolls and lookups for you. However, I find the results to be exactly that: random, discordant dungeons that you have to grind through. They usually lack structure--both narratively in terms of the quest/story and logically in terms of architecture and monster assortment. Simply replacing a dungeon generation die-roll table with cards won't improve this random flavor at all. There needs to be some way to tweak or interpret the cards--either beforehand or during the game--to produce a coherent emergent structure.

Solitaire systems: This is includes Choose Your Own Adventure books, gamebooks, solitaire adventure scenarios, etc. These have a pre-authored plot, and so the quality is better than random generation. But your options tend to be rather limited here to a couple options at a time. More than this and you need to start DMing in order to keep the story moving along its designed path. But DMing requires knowledge of the story, which brings us back to the schizophrenic scenario of solo DM/player.

Balance: So, again, how to balance author-provided quality with user choices and the openness of random generation?

For a little more money, there's a lot of board-game-like dungeon games out there which shoot for this. They provide a quest structure and then board-game rules for playing out the encounters along the way. Indeed, these were the original inspiration for my home-brewed zilch/card-generation system.

But there's another genre out there that does this even better: computer games! Aren't these the perfect solo RPG experience? Rich immersive multimedia experience, randomly generated content for maximum replay value, all with an authored storyline laid over it. Why not just play cRPGs then?

I've already started this exploration. I'm looking at NetHack, Diablo, DiabloII, and NWN. I already know that there's something different about a solitaire table-top RPG vs a cRPG experience, but I'd like to try to nail down just what that is.

I'll let you know what I find out...

Battle for Wesnoth, or The Siren's Call of Semi-Passive Gaming

Not much to report lately. There have been no play sessions, and work on the ex-Scrabble magic system has been sporadic and slow (mostly on the bus). My term ends next Friday, so I'm trying to catch up on my huge grading backlog. Still, most of last week was devoured by Battle for Wesnoth.

I found this computer game while trouble-shooting an old Linux laptop of mine. I wanted to see if the laptop would lock-up during use, so I was just going to play a bit of Tetris. But I had previously uninstalled all the games, so I pulled up the package manager... and happened to notice this turn-based war strategy game with a fantasy theme instead. Wesnoth is free in both senses of the word (as in speech and as in beer), and it's also available for Windows. I know this because I installed it on my normal laptop after it had consumed one evening of my life.

Now fantasy war/strategy might make you think of Warcraft. (The old Warcraft, that is, not WoW.) But Wesnoth is turn-based, which is much more enjoyable for those of us a little slow on the mouse. In fact, it reminds me a lot of an old DOS favorite of mine: Warlords II Deluxe. But they've taken Warlords and added a lot of RPG features to it (and did a better job of it than Warlords III did).

First of all, each of your armies is a named individual that gains experience and levels. Play is structured into campaigns, and so your battle-harded veterans travel with you. And so it hurts a little more when you lose an archer that survived your past two battles and was only a couple kills away from his next level! Each warrior of the same class even starts out a little differently, since each is created with a different combination of traits--such as strong or quick or intelligent.

The various scenarios are strung together into a story-based campaign, much as a series of dungeon crawls can form an RPG campaign. I guess some of the campaigns even have branching storylines, though I haven't experienced that yet myself.

The strategy is pretty interesting too. Terrain affects movement, but it also makes a big difference on how well your armies can defend themselves, and so you always try to use it your advantage. Time passes, and the current time affects the game: daytime makes lawful armies stronger, and nighttime strengthens chaotic armies. And so sometimes you find yourself just trying to keep your head down until dawn comes! Also, each figure on the board has a zone-of-control that limits how opponents can move around it. This reminds me a lot of D&D's attacks of opportunity. I still haven't quite mastered using ZoCs to properly protect my wounded soldiers on the backline though.

Overall, a very nice mix of turn-based strategy and RPG elements.

It also got me thinking about the addictiveness of semi-passive entertainment. It reminds me of the entire college weekends I lost to Diablo. I'd break only for two meals a day, which, incidentally, was usually just long enough to let my mouse hand uncramp.

Passive entertainment rarely gives me that degree of flow. Occasionally I've read a whole paperback non-stop--but that's usually only about 6 hours. Or I might watch two or three movies in a row. But with an addictive computer game, I can go from waking until I collapse completely exhausted in the wee hours of the morning... and be willing to get back on again as soon as I wake up again. Of course, I have too many responsibilities these days to have the great chunks of time required for this lifestyle.

But another source of flow like that for me is RPG rule-hacking and world-building. Since that has recently been my drug of choice, the return to the computer game addiction made me realize an important difference: After a day of world-building, I feel exhausted and a little guilty for neglecting all my "real" and "important" obligations, but I have something to show for it--some artifact I've actively created. I wasn't just consuming content. Although the time just flew by while plugged into Wesnoth, I felt rather deflated and empty when I finally jacked out.

Anyway, with all the grading due, I've been afraid to open Wensoth again since last week. And with all the Zludge and RPG ideas that need to be written up, I'm hoping I don't open it for a while longer after that. But active creation is daunting... sometimes we just want to jack in to a little semi-passive entertainment, with just enough challenge to keep us flowing.