Diablo – Does Diablo 2 LOD Run On Latest Mac OS X (April 2017)

backwards compatibilitydiablo-2macos

An extension of this question, does Diablo 2 LOD run on OSX <= 10.12?

I just tested this on 10.10 Yosemite and it installed, but my screen is flickering weird colors when in full-screen mode… any configuration required that I don't know about?

When I ran it without the expansion it worked properly – which is a huge step in the right direction.

Best Answer

Quick Note

I have tested the below on Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10; I am unaware of the behavior on other OS's and would graciously accept any comments for others experiences.

Solution

Diablo II was updated to be mac compatible! You no longer need Wine or Dual-Boot Windows to play this on a mac. You can download the mac version directly from Blizzard's offical website.

That said, there are still some quirks I noticed...

If you are getting flickering, run Diablo II in windowed mode.

You can do this with Command + M while in Diablo II.

If you use an external display

I was getting a weird error when trying to play Diablo II using my TV:

Diablo II was unable to continue because the selected video mode was unable to initialize

This is a slave / master display error - you get a more detailed message by running Diablo II through the Terminal.

Turns out: if you have your displays mirrored AND your macbook is open (meaning you have two screens running) you get the error above; it seems Diablo II has trouble figuring out how to launch when there are multiple displays present.

Best fix

Close your MacBook screen, and use your TV as your only display while playing Diablo II; This was by far the best solution because I could full-screen Diablo II and avoid windowed mode.

If you can't live without multiple displays... or you don't care about the size of display

Run Diablo II in windowed mode

How to run Diablo II in windowed mode on a mac

Either use the solution at the top, or if that isn't possible, then, follow these steps:

1) Open Terminal

2) cd "/Applications/Diablo II/Diablo II.app/Contents/MacOS"

Step 2 assumes you installed in the default location

3) ./Diablo\ II -w

The -w specifies the executable to run in windowed mode; there are also other arguments you can run on this executable. Here is a link to more command line arguments for Diablo II

You probably can modify the shortcut to avoid using Terminal to do this... but... I don't remember how... If anyone knows please chime in. As a programmer, I personally prefer using Terminal... but I could see this being annoying for the average user.

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