Livestream 10/14/2021 – Diablo 2 on the Mac

I think it’s an unspoken rule now that I stream on whatever was the focus of the most recently published video. So since I just upgraded the video card in the Power Mac G4 AGP model that became the natural choice. I struggled a bit when it came what to play since this was mostly a 3D performance boost and not so much 2D (although I’m sure there was a gain there as well) I just couldn’t think of what to play. Since during the last stream with this machine we focused on the, then current, Rage 128 Pro we had already gone through a ton of 3D titles.

So my choice fell on Diablo 2 which is a game I have spent countless hours in but of course on PC. It was available on Mac as well and as we found out perhaps best run in software mode on our machine. The game supports accelerated graphics either via the Mac specific renderer Rave or the more common OpenGL option. Either one interestingly enough proved difficult as the game was freezing up frequently. First we thought it was due to the hard drive giving out due to the long loading times that followed before the machine unfroze (aka drink break) but after switching to sofware rendering everything ran like a charm! Gaming on the Mac platform as a whole is still a learning experience for me and honestly I think it’s sort of fun to dig into something new like this and learn all the ins and outs of a particular environment.

So technical detours aside Diablo 2 is just as addictive as it was back then. Of course considering the recent resurrected release of this game it still holds a special place with gamers yet to this day. Check out the replay below with about the first half having the slowdown issues which we then fixed and the game ran great after that.