Diablo

Introduction

Only marginally an FRPG, more a hack & slash.

Diablo II

The second version, Diablo's back with multi-player fun. It offers a LAN connect over tcp/ip and a WAN connect via their server hosted worlds. Some of these were hacked in 2001, according to "The Register".

This is now quite an old game, and it seems there are patches to be obtained. See the Diablo 2 Patch page. Alternatively, playing on their network automatically patches the game. Since I have two machines, I had only played Diablo Online on one of them, so the the other needed to be patched, which I did by downloading the patch and installing.

Playing on a Lan

Name Services

Open Tech Support .net says it doesn't like dhcp. The desktops should not be dhcp clients. Oops they are! The Alienware seems to have been meddled with while away. I have used Windows to install a fixed ip address. I have ensured that I use the correct local addresses, it hangs while waiting to join. Now I need to try the internet address.

Do we need two disks?

According to Cheap Ass Gamer one should make a spawn copy. This works for LAN games, but not for connection to the Blizzard Server.

Network Appliance

This can muck things up. See the Diablo II networking site at http://www.idleminds.org, which has a good intro on the problems with of proxy servers. I have taken his advice and have enabled enabled port forwarding from my public internet address to the games host on ports 4000 an 6112-6119, TCP & UDP. Still not enough.

Apply the Patch

I needed the Version 1.12a patch to be applied to one of the games and that works fine. See above.

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