Based on it's released by Activision-Blizzard, you have better chance finding a pot of gold.

I believe someone reverse engineered the Diablo source code at some point, and although it's not official I suppose someone could some day come up with an unofficial remaster..

Probably talking about devilution.
Despite what I have below Devilution should work on 9x as well I just never got around to testing. DevilutionX requires XP but does work with kernelex on 98SE

I refuse to play any Blizzard games infested with DRM until it comes off. They all suck after Starcraft 1 anyway and the shitshow with their game re-releases is ridiculous.
That's not even counting what's going on in the news right now with them.

Game Port OS Compatibility

Diablo

Devilution
(XP32) v0.10.0

DevilutionX
(XP32) v1.1.0

Diablo 1 HD Mod
(2000 BWC - XP32) v1.045

Project Tchenobog
(2000 BWC - XP32) v0.2.0e

The Hell
(2000) v1.205d
(2000 BWC - XP32) v1.235

/EDIT DevilutionX v1.3 Released https://www.rpgwatch.com/show/newsbit?rwsitei … 1&newsbit=46551

DosFreak wrote on 2021-11-03, 15:55:

I refuse to play any Blizzard games infested with DRM until it comes off. They all suck after Starcraft 1 anyway and the shitshow with their game re-releases is ridiculous.
That's not even counting what's going on in the news right now with them.

I refuse to install Battle.net on my computers anymore. The only game I somewhat miss is StarCraft II. It's coop multiplayer was pretty fun, and I really enjoyed it's single player campaign mechanically. Narratively it was a dumpster fire.

I'm currently progressing through Quake 2 on my P233MMX/Riva128 rig. Debating swapping out the PCI Riva128 for an AGP Riva128 card. But I'm trying not to stretch the purpose of this build too far beyond it's original purpose. Still, I found Q2 ran smoothly enough early on, but as I progress through the game, the level geometry and the on screen enemies seem to push the system marginally more. Or maybe as my rose tinted glasses for my first graphics card wear off, I'm just noticing the 15-30 fps framerate more. My understanding from contemporary coverage is that going AGP instead of PCI might raise the floor of the FPS slightly.

I still kind of love it though.

Comprehensive list of reasons to switch out a PCI Riva128 for an AGP Riva128

i) You need the PCI slot for something else.
ii) It's dying, and you've got the AGP one spare.
iii) A popular youtube channel mentions the PCI version in passing and prices go up 5000% on fleabay.

🤣

5 hours and 22 minutes into Metro Last Light. I've gotten to Chapter 12 and so far so good. Just enough challenge on Normal difficulty. I'm enjoying the story but get a little thrown off by all the parts that take the controls out of your hands (such as crawling through a hole where there are several seconds of animation before giving you control back). Being of Russian descent and speaking and understanding a bit of the language, it's fun to hear the occasional Russian words thrown into the English voices. The character models have a decidedly "Russian Fairytale" style of artwork, which took awhile to get used to, but it's pretty much locked at 60 fps, so I'm happy with the performance on my old, midrange rig. I'm not crazy about the checkpoint system, though. There have been a couple of times that I've cleared a section, then while exploring, accidentally wandered through the entrance to the next section. Typically, the door gets locked behind you, so you can't go back to resume exploration, and there's no way to reload except back to the beginning of the previous checkpoint, so you have to re-clear that previous section again.

Finished Thief 2. Overall, I would rate it higher than the first game, though it does have some shortcomings as well.

First the good stuff. The EAX implementation was handled superbly in this game. Listening to rain falling on the roof of wooden buildings was a particular highlight. Lava filled caves and underwater areas had some nice effects too. Positional audio was excellent, and greatly helped with anticipating the approaching opponents.

This game had many great missions, but the one that really stood out for me was "Life of the Party". Jumping between rooftops, listening to people's everyday conversations and discovering a bunch of secret places on the way to the main goal was probably the most fun I had during my playthrough.

Now for the bad stuff. Collision detection is still problematic. I was often getting stuck on furniture and inside narrow passages. And jumping on/off ladders and ropes had a random chance of failure on each try. The last couple of areas were kind of tedious. A reused map from Thief 1 followed by a level which you have to play twice (due to plot requirements) really killed the mood for me. And it didn't help that the final mission had a mind-boggling number of enemies and required a ton of backtracking through rooms filled with loud, annoying sounding machinery. It dragged on for way too long and just felt like an huge chore.

Once again, my view is that the Thief games are at their best when you're up against human opponents and doing some actual thieving. Whenever the developers strayed from that formula, the missions just weren't as enjoyable for me. Thankfully, Thief 2 had more fun levels than tedious ones, so my overall impression of the game is quite favorable.

Preparing to start Thief 3: Deadly Shadows. I only played that game once, back when it first came out, and I just had a pitiful on-board sound card for EAX at the time. Now, I'm using an X-Fi Titanium and can finally turn on all the relevant sound options:

As suggested by various gaming forums, I set the speaker configuration to "Headphones" in Creative's Console Launcher, turned on both CMSS-3D options and disabled synchronization with the Control Panel. Finally, I set the Windows speaker settings to 7.1. And lo and behold, this does seem to result in some really nice positional audio over headphones. Granted, I only played through the training mission with this setup, but I like how it works so far.

Unfortunately, I'm experiencing some flickering issues with certain light sources. Mostly those chandeliers which sway from side to side. It might be caused by my monitor's refresh rate being too high or some driver incompatibility. I'll have to troubleshoot this a bit more before getting to play the game properly.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-11-05, 17:14:

Unfortunately, I'm experiencing some flickering issues with certain light sources. Mostly those chandeliers which sway from side to side. It might be caused by my monitor's refresh rate being too high or some driver incompatibility. I'll have to troubleshoot this a bit more before getting to play the game properly.

Running this engine "too fast" causes a lot of stupid problems to happen. That sounds like one of them.

Remember, Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows are OG XBox centric games. You're basically running a Unreal Engine built around the OG XBox's nuances, and thus a lot of stuff just doesn't work properly even despite the fact the OG XBox was, more or less, integrated PC hardware...

Are you playing it with the Sneaky Upgrade? If not you should be.
If playing on XP you'll need to use v1.1.6
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=138607

I would therefore expect it would run nicer on the GF4 than the 9600GT ... xbox being a custom GF3

DracoNihil wrote on 2021-11-05, 20:09:

Running this engine "too fast" causes a lot of stupid problems to happen. That sounds like one of them.

I managed to solve the flickering issue in Thief 3 by setting "Maximum pre-rendered frames" to zero in the Nvidia driver panel. With that and VSync set to on, everything now works as it should.

DosFreak wrote on 2021-11-05, 20:14:

Are you playing it with the Sneaky Upgrade? If not you should be.
If playing on XP you'll need to use v1.1.6

I have heard good things about that mod, but I'd like my first replay in 15+ years to be just the classic experience. Maybe next time.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-11-05, 20:16:

I would therefore expect it would run nicer on the GF4 than the 9600GT ... xbox being a custom GF3

That was plan B.

If I hadn't resolved the issue on the Athlon64 system, I would have popped an Audigy2 ZS into my AthlonXP rig and played it there.

Now that I'm almost 7 hours into Metro Last Light (Redux), I'm remembering some of the UI quirks from Metro 2033 that bugged me. I can't for the life of me see if there's a way to identify your weapons during gameplay. All you get is a silhouette image of the weapon when you hold down TAB. When you first buy a weapon, there is a text name of that weapon, but when you're in the middle of a level and come across weapons with the option of swapping them, all you get is an image. Am I missing something? I'm forced to ALT-TAB out of the game and look at a weapons guide page to be sure of the weapon I'm about to swap out. There have already been a couple of times that I swapped for what I thought was a better weapon, just based on how it looked, and I was wrong. Another one is when entering and exiting a rail car, you use the letter E. Several times I've tried to exit the rail car with X (my brain associates X with Exit) and ended up throwing a grenade and damaging myself (I changed the keyboard shortcut for Crouch from left CTRL to C because it's too hard for me to comfortably hold left CTRL while also moving, which means I changed the keyboard shortcut for Throw from C to X). Also, the system of swapping thrown weapons seems clunky. Hold TAB down, then move the mouse to the image of the item you want readied (knife, grenade, etc). It's still a great game and none of these issues are showstoppers, but these are legit issues for me with this game.

I'm testing the latest beta release of Daggerfall Unity, which has some changes to the rendering engine. It's quite buggy, so I am encountering many problems with gameplay, which is odd considering that the changes to the code in this line of beta releases are for rendering. Later today, I will download and install the latest stable release of it and install the DREAM mod to enjoy the game properly.

Continuing my Thief 3 playthrough, now that the technical issues are out of the way. Visually, it is a huge improvement over the previous installments. Same goes for the sound, which is more realistic than ever, thanks to EAX4. However, in some other ways, this game kind of feels like a step back.

For example, the map is now just a crude, hand drawn sketch. It no longer shows which areas you've already explored, nor what room you're currently in. Levels are much smaller and separated into multiple parts connected by "loading screen" portals.

It's also evident that the game was designed with the third-person view in mind, as Garrett unnaturally fidgets and stutters when you use the first-person mode. Then there's the wonky early-2000s attempt at ragdoll physics, where everything feels like it's made of rubber.

The core gameplay is fairly decent though, with some notable improvements arising from tech advancements. For example, sneaking around a torch carrying guard is difficult, because the light causes the shadows to shift as he moves around. And since sound now propagates through open windows, people can hear you from afar if you're not careful. Overall, the enemies seem to be much more intelligent this time around.

I started Fallout on Windows 98 SE. Somehow feels more satisfying than playing it on Steam or GoG (though I leave the steam version running just to log the length of my playthrough).

Finished Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2, it wasn't as good I remembered it. The light sabre action is a complete let down. Jk2 is a much better
'jedi' experience. The level design was kind of interesting and fmv is always cool. Final boss was as frustrating as I remembered him.

try Force Unleashed

Yeah I played them on some console, maybe the Wii. But it was a long time ago. Time is right for a replay!