Diablo Levels 1 & 2 Vintage Packard Bell PC Capture
9Diablo is a game that needs no introduction. Released in December, 1996 it revolutionized the action RPG, combining randomized dungeon level spawning with fast, intense gameplay. If Rogue and Gauntlet had an unholy love child, that child would be Diablo.
I played Diablo in 1997-98, mainly on battle.net, but I have a CD of the game as was it originally released (v1.00). Here I begin a single player game and show off the basics down to levels 1 and 2. You can talk to the townspeople of Tristram, all eight of them. You can buy weapons and armor off Griswold, healing potions from Pepin (who also heals you for free), rare items from Wirt and magic spells, staves and mana potions from Adria. Cain can identify items for a fee. Griswold can repair weapons and armor and Adria can recharge staves. They will also comment on each other and on quests. There are sixteen main levels in the game but quests, which are somewhat randomly given from game to game, offer more.
I am capturing this footage on a Packard Bell Platinum 2010, which was rather similar in specs to the first Packard Bell on which I played Diablo. It has a Pentium 166 MMX running on an Intel i430VX chipset, 48 MiB of EDO DRAM (upgraded from the stock 16 MiB), 256KiB L2 cache, integrated S3 Trio 64V+ graphics w/2 MiB of graphics, a 2.1GB hard drive and a 16x speed CD-ROM. The sound is output by an ISA Aztech sound/modem card based on the AZT2320 chip which does the job in Windows 95 and offers good Sound Blaster Pro compatibility as well. Virtually all loading is off the CD-ROM, the install is as vanilla as it comes and almost all the game assets are stored on the CD-ROM. I'm running Windows 95 OSR 2.1, which is what came on the recovery disc (the system has USB ports. OSR 2.1 is the earliest version of Windows 9x to support them). These specs are well above the minimum system requirements, a Pentium 60 MHz, 8 MiB of RAM (single player) and a 2x CD-ROM drive.
The video capture is by the Datapath VisionRGB E1s. The drivers for this card have an issue with the 640x480 resolution at 59.94Hz in that they will not capture the last two or three lines properly. I can use a higher refresh with Windows but Diablo does not seem to respect the refresh rate chosen and sticks with 59.94Hz. Fortunately the bottom two lines only encompass the last bits of the HUD's border in this game.
At the end of Level 2 I saved outside The Butcher's room because I recalled that the Butcher is a difficult enemy at the low levels and may require some exploration to improve your character so he can take on the creature and have a good chance of winning. I might do another video picking up where I left off.