This article was originally posted in Sep 2008, I said, “Only marginally an FRPG, more a hack & slash.”, but the bulk of this article is/was about how to play multi player and the home network hacks needed to make it work. 

Diablo II

The second version, Diablo’s back with multi-player fun. It offers a LAN connect over tcp/ip and a WAN connect via their server hosted worlds. Some of these were hacked in 2001, according to “The Register”.

This is now quite an old game, and it seems there are patches to be obtained. See the Diablo 2 Patch page. Alternatively, playing on their network automatically patches the game. Since I have two machines, I had only played Diablo Online on one of them, so the the other needed to be patched, which I did by downloading the patch and installing.

Playing on a Lan

Name Services

Open Tech Support .net says it doesn’t like dhcp. The desktops should not be dhcp clients. Oops they are! The Alienware seems to have been meddled with while away. I have used Windows to install a fixed ip address. I have ensured that I use the correct local addresses, it hangs while waiting to join. Now I need to try the internet address.

Do we need two disks?

According to Cheap Ass Gamer one should make a spawn copy. This works for LAN games, but not for connection to the Blizzard Server.

Network Appliance

This can muck things up. See the Diablo II networking site at http://www.idleminds.org, which has a good intro on the problems with of proxy servers. I have taken his advice and have enabled enabled port forwarding from my public internet address to the games host on ports 4000 an 6112-6119, TCP & UDP. Still not enough.

Apply the Patch

I needed the Version 1.12a patch to be applied to one of the games and that works fine. See the patch site above.

Keywords/Tags: “Diablo 2” LAN multiplayer home configure howto network

Dave, 23 May 2009.

I and Ben reconfigured the firewall and re-connected a game. The alienware acts as the host, and the dell joins the game using the public ip address as the connection address. Friends from outside the internet also managed to join the game, but couldn’t create a character because they didn’t have the expansion pack.

Dave, 23 May 2009.

It seems that the ‘guest’ can be a dhcp client. A truly remote system using dhcp for its address and gateway connected to a game host on our LAN today. We used Diablo II, without the expansion pack as the game platform on the Dell. The guest uses a different ISP to us and a different home hub technology. The guest was connected to its home hub using a wired connection. I repointed the firewall rules to the Dell.In order to get back to the previous configuration and play multiplayer on the LAN I may need to reinstall the expansion pack on the Dell. I should test if the expansion pack is available to other users. If so, then the firewall rules need to be repointed at the proposed game host. Otherwise the Expansion pack needs to be reinstalled.

Dave Games , , , , , , , ,

One Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.