gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/s/OpenBSD/681

Been getting the x270 ready for a bank holiday staycation. Ordered and installed a 74Wh removable battery. I also found my old Diablo CD so I've installed devilutionx via pkg_add :)

The install was not without a few snags though (and not the good Aussie kind). As you'd expect the pkg_add itself went fine... however, there's no man page with the package to tell you what data files are required froom the original CD nor could I find a readme. After some Googling, well search.brave.com and a few assumptions based on the FreeBSD info linked from the git repo I found that a single file needed copying. DIABDAT.MPQ needs copying to ~/.local/share/diasurgical/devilution.

I tried launching devilutionx from dmenu and was presented with a dialog and button with absolutely no text. Clicking the button ended the program. So, I attempted to run it from the terminal. No better result but this time there were some INFO errors about two PCX files and a TTF that couldn't be found. More Brave searching took me to a git issue report for OpenBSD which was now closed. Their was some talk of issues of older WMs havingv issues where as newer ones worked but the big that resolved things for me. When you copy the file across from the CD rename it to LOWERCASE. Launched it again and... success!

Playing Diablo 1 is a huge TODO in my list. A pretty significant percentage of my adolescence was dedicated to playing Diablo 2, but I never even tried the first one. How playable is DevilutionX?

@lufte I had the slight issues I mentioned getting it up and running but so far the engine itself has been flawless. To be fair though, I've only played the first couple of levels of the dungeon so far (boy will I be glad when I get a scroll of town portal). I don't have the Hell Fire expansion so that could potentially change things; there are some settings you can add to the config for a few TEST Character Classes but having never played Hell Fire I don't know if the Barbarian etc... are related to that or were excluded from the original for some reason but game data remained present. There are some additional UI elements you can enable too like an XP bar but I'm running it vanilla for now.

@lufte worth mentioning that I'm on Intel integrated graphics too. If you were to run it with an AMDGPU I don't know if that would affect your experience. Back in the day though the loads were fairly (not overly) lengthy but on a modern processor with an SSD its nice and snappy :) I think the original requirement was for a Pentium 133MHz CPU and a few Megs of RAM. Alot of progress has been made since then and of course most newer systems don't even ship with a DVD/BluRay drive let alone a CD-ROM drive.

That's good to know, thanks for the details! And the original game can be bought from GOG so it all looks pretty promising.

I am Deckard Cain; Stay a while and listen.

#devilutionx #diablo #gaming #openbsd

4 Comments ↓