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ragnar-gd wrote:

Here someone noticed (in german) D2 is broken for him for W9x since the latest patch: […]
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Here someone noticed (in german) D2 is broken for him for W9x since the latest patch:

http://www.dosforum.de/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=11599

It basically shows a screenshot after D2 crashed, and a (new) dependency to a w2000-DLL.

I have the same problem.

Just a local artefact/small problem?

Ideas wellcome...

Yep, not even current KernelEx will fix it.. It's a shame but I guess that's where it's heading with Blizzard modernizing classic titles. The same goes for Warcraft 3 and the latest patch, it does not work on W98 either.

Am I missing something? The later Diablo 2 updates were to just fix compatibility with newer operating systems.

DosFreak wrote:

Am I missing something? The later Diablo 2 updates were to just fix compatibility with newer operating systems.

Exactly, and it seems they incorporated some new mechanics to improve NT compatibility, that breaks win9x...

StarCraft is still fine, so is Diablo and Warcraft 2 Bnett edition, but Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2 is affected. KernelEx in its current is not able to fix unfortunately.

Edit:
Even the patches themselves will have problem installing on w98, especially Warcraft 3 patch.

ragnar-gd wrote:

Ideas wellcome...

Well, it's potentially fixable via a binary patch to game's exe file (at least for the SHGetFolderPathA problem, but there may be more issues after this one is overcome).
But is it worth trying? Are there important game issues fixed besides "fixing compatibility on modern systems"?

Moved, but this topic's kinda weird to begin with, so I can't blame OP for confusion. 😉

So, I have a list of the latest patches of Blizzard classic games that are guaranteed to work with Windows 9x :

Diablo : 1.09 (latest)
Warcraft 2 Battle.net Ed : 2.02 (latest)
Starcraft & Brood War : 1.161
Diablo II & Lord of Destruction : 1.13d
Warcraft III & Frozen Throne : 1.26a

Discussed this a bit with my brother, who knows almost anything worth knowing about DII. His theory was that it's the move to storing of gamesaves and configuration in the user directory instead of the game directory, and the corresponding usage of Windows NT specific path related environment variables, that breaks W98 support.

Has anyone tried simply creating a user directory structure like that in W10, and set the corresponding environment variables accordingly with the SET command?

It's because they added some system survey program. The game .exe calls for this program when starting. Since the survey program doesn't run on W9x or even 2K, you can't run the game.

Pretty sad that some useless utility that nobody ever uses breaks support.

what survey program please?

The latest patches add this program to your Diablo II directory:
BlizzardError.exe

If your game crashes, a folder called BlizzardError is created in the directory of the game. There you can find logs, in .txt format.

I believe they did the same with Warcraft III. I think that also won't work anymore on systems running 9x-2K.

Edit: oh and they also remove the d2config.exe with the latest patches, don't really know why (they say nobody could use them, but they are wrong, it even worked on Windows 8.)

and you cannot replace that program with your own that would exit normally?