I'm old enough to remember that when Diablo came out, it seemed to be running too fast. This was before 3D video cards were mainstream (which happened with the Voodoo and Quake in 1997 maybe?).<p>I was working a lot with blitters at that point and running into speed issues on the Mac because Apple liked to release machines with half-width busses, which cut memory throughput by almost half. I'd be lucky to get 60 fps on a fullscreen 640x480 blit in 256 colors on a 68k Mac, but PCs seemed to do it trivially, and also do more with masking and color mapping at nearly the same speed.<p>Even PowerPC Macs ran between 2-10 times slower than their Pentium counterparts on tons of games. For example, Descent ran at 10 fps or whatever and was barely playable on a PPC 601, but ran great on a 100 MHz Pentium. Even Duke Nukem 3D ran full speed on a 100 MHz 486dx4. That could not have all simply been due to a lack of optimization on the Mac side.<p>This is all from memory so take it with a grain of salt. But I'm mildly curious what kind of approaches went into their blitting, and if they used things like palette animation (which wasn't available on the Mac because Apple put a blocking call on the palette change, which synced it to the refresh rate, although I never tried it from another thread because I don't think it was thread-safe).
I remember going on vacation with my parents and all I had was the Diablo game manual, because I got the game 1 hour before we left. I read the manual about 100 times in the car... good memories
For anyone interested in the history of Diablo, the GDC post mortem is well worth a watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc</a><p>Quite a bit of detail regarding the origin of the game, going turn-based to real-time, the studio becoming Blizzard North, etc.<p>Also here's the original design doc: <a href="https://www.graybeardgames.com/download/diablo_pitch.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.graybeardgames.com/download/diablo_pitch.pdf</a>
There is a slowly but steadily progressing engine being developed at <a href="https://freeablo.org/" rel="nofollow">https://freeablo.org/</a>
Just leavin dis here <a href="https://archive.org/details/Diablo_1996_Blizzard" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/Diablo_1996_Blizzard</a>
Haven’t played Diablo 1, I grew up with Diablo 2 (I’m a bit younger lol), but for me D2 represents the most memorable athmosphere in gaming. Man...that music in Act 1...<p>Years later I bought 2 copies of D2 to replay it. Needed 2 because no shared stash to transfer items between characters.
There is no cow level..<p><a href="https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/69604/what-does-it-mean-there-is-no-cow-level" rel="nofollow">https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/69604/what-does-i...</a>
QA tester on Diablo 2 Expansion here.<p>There was sort of an infamous bug I found on the old D2 Expansion discs that let you bypass securom as well as play as expansion characters in non-expansion games using non-expansion discs. In fact, once you put in the D2 Expansion disc, all the configs got copied and if you switched to the regular non-expansion disc you were able to retain all the expansion features for as long as you had your PC on ;)
So many fun hours spent playing with friends and talking about it!<p>Thanks for the work and trying to breathe new life into it. Look forward to new generations enjoying it.