[Eric D.V.H.]

In light of Diablo III coming out in the future, I've been playing some Diablo II again, but am encountering some problems related to the expansion pack. I can create and play the original character types (barbarian, sorceress, paladin, amazon, necromancer) without problems, and I can even play Act 5 as them with no trouble. But whenever I try to use certain expansion exclusive items, to create a character of an expansion exclusive class (assassin, druid) or to play using existing characters of these types, it freezes in a rather odd fashion:

When creating/loading assassins and druids, the loading-screen animation of the church door opening pops up and starts going, like normal, but then the cursor appears onscreen (as the normal black arrow, not D2's custom gauntlet,) the the music cuts out, and the door animation jumps to the final frame. I can then move the cursor around, but I can't Apple-tab out of the program, and allowing it to sit for an hour produced no progress. Apple-option-escape caused D2 to quit immediately, switching back from 640·480 8-bit to my normal settings automatically.

When equipping expansion exclusive items (shrunken heads, crown shields, etc…), there is also a similar lockup during play (normal black arrow cursor appears, sound stops, game freezes, I can move the cursor, force quit exits.) Strangely, I can socket runes and jewels into items and equip them without problems, charms work properly when held and all the mercenary management-related features work fine.

I'm running the latest 1.12 carbon and classic clients (I initially tried it with 1.09d, then updated, producing no improvement) under OS 10.4.11 (and 9.2.2 ) on a 1.25GHz single CPU PMG4 (2003 MDD) with 1.25GB RAM and a 128MB GeForce 4Ti.

Aside from these freezing bugs, the game runs flawlessly under OS X. None of these problems occur when running the OS 9 client in the same installation, whether natively booted or through Classic (sadly, D2 has been broken with massive framerate issues under the classic Mac OS since 8.6, so I can't play it that way.) Has anyone ever heard of this issue before?

Eric.

[MadDog]

Eric D.V.H., on July 13th 2009, 10:39 AM, said:

In light of Diablo III coming out in the future, I've been playing some Diablo II again, but am encountering some problems related to the expansion pack. I can create and play the original character types (barbarian, sorceress, paladin, amazon, necromancer) without problems, and I can even play Act 5 as them with no trouble. But whenever I try to use certain expansion exclusive items, to create a character of an expansion exclusive class (assassin, druid) or to play using existing characters of these types, it freezes in a rather odd fashion:

probably related - I started playing this again, and I have a similar problem. Version 1.12 LoD, when I equip a necromancer with a shrunken head item, the game will crash 100% of the time when I close the inventory window.

Mad Dog

[Cobra]

MadDog, on July 16th 2009, 10:23 AM, said:

probably related - I started playing this again, and I have a similar problem. Version 1.12 LoD, when I equip a necromancer with a shrunken head item, the game will crash 100% of the time when I close the inventory window.

Mad Dog

I remember having this issue.
Clean install both the original game and then the expansion Lord of Destruction.
Once that is done download the Lord of Destruction patch and apply it.
Do not use any other patches and all should be good.

[Eric D.V.H.]

Hmm… Some of Blizzard's patch pages warns of Dire Things™ happening when vanilla D2 patches are applied to a LoD installation, or LoD patches are applied to a vanilla D2 installation, so your suggestion might be right. I'll see if I can dig out my D2 discs and try a fresh install to find out if that clears things up.

Eric,

[Crunchy in milk]

I was going to suggest trying crossover but then I read the bit about classic. Someone else running through Diablo 2 again told me they're using a widescreen hack and I'm keen to check that out myself but its pc only so its boot camp or crossover. Multi Resolution Hack (linked at gamershell)

[devSin]

If the in-game resolution actually changes (instead of simply scaling), then no, there's no such support on any platform, and if you do play that way on Battle.net, it very well may be an offense that could get your account banned (assuming that don't have some .exe checksumming that prevents B.net play altogether with this sort of hack).

[Crunchy in milk]

I never said it was official, its a fan hack. Obviously using it on Battle.net is iffy to stupid and I wouldn't do that but since I would most likely be going solo or local area network there's no harm in it and it looks good from the screenshots I've seen. Over its life span I think I've bought Diablo 2, 3 times now so I've got plenty of keys to fall back on should some overzealous person at blizzard decide to block one of them. The program uses a modified exe to start up so I doubt bnet works anyway.

[devSin]

Sorry, there was a post after yours that said widescreen support existed in the official Mac version, so I was replying to that.

For your own personal use, rock on.