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Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

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Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#51
post #48
post #11

We should clone this repository before Github gets sent a DMCA takedown notice.

>"This work is being released to the Public Domain. No assets of Diablo are being provided. You must own a copy of Diablo and have access to the assets beforehand in order to use this software."

Just because someone says what they are doing is legal doesn't mean it is. IANAL so I don't know but the source files have Blizzard's copyright warning in them

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#52
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing happened to me with Diablo 2. It came out while my family was visiting my aunt on the other side of the country. My parents bought it for me, but my aunt and uncle didn't have a computer that could play it, so I spent the week looking through the manual.

I had the inverse with carmageddon. I used to study abroad so I waited till I was on vacation to get the uncensored edition, then carried the box all the way home. The manual wasn’t as tick nor as useful as caesar iii’s tho.

Holy crap I forgot about that game

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#53
post #9

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

The first Diablo manual had great background stories and mythology. When I watched Constantine for the first time, I realize it had the same setting as Diablo!

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#55
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, you can still use a broken cd.

I wouldn't risk it anymore. One time I received an ever so slightly cracked DVD from Netflix. Desperate to watch the show without waiting for a better copy to be mailed, I stuck it in the computer anyways. Ended up shattering and taking my DVD drive with it!

That's one way to get a free DVD drive from Netflix.

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#56
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?).

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.

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.

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).

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#58
post #9

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 me it was the Bard's Tale. A demo of Skara brae and a couple of levels of the first dungeon was put on a magazine cover in the UK months before the game came out.

I played that demo to oblivion, I can still pretty much remember all the street layouts

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#59
post #29
post #9

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

I fondly remember the Ultima VI manual, complete with cloth map. Those were the days :)

Ultima IV for me.... Good times

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#60
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

edit : Didn't read the the "spiritual" part of the "spiritual successor". Though you could argue diablo 3 is, I would not be so bold. You should still try diablo 3 if you haven't. Diablo 3 is actually pretty good now if you want a successor. If you just want something similar to diablo 2 I suggest torchlight or titan quest. Diablo 1 is tricky because it was so much closer to rogue likes (probably because originally i…

>Diablo 3 is actually pretty good now if you want a successor. Diablo 3 is in no way a spiritual successor to D1 and 2. Yes, it's much better than it was at release, but it is still very much a streamlined, mass market friendly ARPG. Modern Diablo gameplay consists of leveling (1-2 hours), finishing your season journey (another 2-3 hours, maybe), getting your free super-powerful six piece handed to you, and then grin…

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