Diablo I (yes, Diablo 1) LAN play on Vista or Windows 7

– and presumably 8.

There’s various convoluted steps to get LAN play working on more recent versions of Windows.

Mount the ISO on your hard drive, and use the somewhat unstable Microsoft supplied ISO mounting program to fool the program into thinking you CD is in a CD drive.  Install Diablo from here.  This step is not strictly necessary, but it’s so much quicker and cleaner than the alternatives.

Fetch and apply the patch to bring Diablo 1.00 up to version 1.09.  It may also be helpful to pull up the properties of the .exe and enable compatibility mode with WinXP Service Pack x. When fetching patch, get it for the version you’re installing – much confusion is caused if you get the spawned Diablo patch and apply it to the full version.

Go and get IPXWrapper, and per the instructions drop the DLL files into your Diablo directory. If you have a heterogeneous environment, all machines need to use this wrapper – IPXWrapper is a translation layer than transforms IPX into UDP, and without it IPX aware OSes like WinXP won’t see the network traffic of the IPX unaware OSes like Vista.  Punch a hole in your Windows Firewall to allow UDP port 54792.

To fix the palette issue, download the registry patch, which seems to work under Vista as well:

32-bit Windows 7 – http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/diablo/d109_x86.reg
64-bit Windows 7 – http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/diablo/d109_x64.reg

See?  Easy.  Doesn’t take more than a few hours if you don’t know what you’re doing.

9 thoughts on “Diablo I (yes, Diablo 1) LAN play on Vista or Windows 7

  1. Anonymous

    After a couple of hours of messing with Hamachi and failing miserably, I decided to look for alternatives and this was so much easier and faster. Thanks!

  2. Cthanatos

    I got it to work, but when I copied the text for the bat, I had to replace the ” in the file with then same character, as that apparently made the difference.

  3. josh Post author

    Yeah, it turns out the batch file is a crappy way to fix that problem. Try the registry fixes (added)

  4. emmanuel

    you saved my life man, after messing around with tunggle, tcp-com and hamachi you provided something that could be done in less than 5 minutes 🙂

  5. Jean-Francois Vachon

    That was crazy easy and it’s working perfectly. Thank you so much my man!

  6. Guest 123

    start Diablo 1 and Diablo:Hellfire on new Versions Windows – Download Diablo Direct Draw Path Resolution Mod!

  7. Laurie

    Wow, this worked perfectly! I solved my video problems with the 1.09 patch, got ipxwrapper to let lan work, and even got sound working! Using Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit and Diablo 1. I never thought it would work, but it does! Now my whole family can play together! You are awesome!

Comments are closed.