DOS ain't dead

> > Is there a pre-compiled binary available anywhere? I'd like to try this
> out
> > in bare metal DOS.
>
> Sure, here is it:
> LINK
>
> On the download page click to "STAZENI ZDARMA" (free download)
Thanks, but your link does not go to any files. It just goes to:
https://fastshare.cloud/

which is some sort of generic file service.

The real link which you provided (https://fastshare.cloud/31715435/diablo-devx-dos-02.zip) just re-directs to this paywall (?) site with no download or "Stazeni Zdarma" option.

I did a search for diablo-devx-dos-02.zip on Google and came up with:
https://sdilej.cz/Diablo/s/archive-2 which contains the 8 mb file diablo-devx-dos-02.zip but, again when I attempt to download it goes to a pay site and re-directs to: https://sdilej.cz/

Frustrating. May you please host the file locally or on your site or a temporary location instead? Very much appreciated!

Hello Laaca,

There is a register dump. It might be useful to read it.

Thank you!

---
https://codeberg.org/tkchia · https://git.disroot.org/tkchia · 😴 "MOV AX,0D500H+CMOS_REG_D+NMI"

> I managed to get it to work some time ago on real DOS machine with GeForce4
> card.
> But I had to use the UniVBE which replaces to VBE BIOS to not to overwrite
> the modelist during other VESA calls.
> (it is also a tricky thing because the GeForce4 is not supported by UniVBE
> so it was necesarry to use unofficial patcher for it...)
>
> However, the colors were not correct - everything was too dark (maybe some
> problem with expected DAC width - 6 or 8 bits issue) and I also had a
> problem with some animation, maybe attact animation - when the animation
> started it never ended and stayed in infinite loop.
I got it partially working on bare dos on a "modern" system: i5-8250u with integrated Intel onboard GPU - but colors were dark. This is obviously a palette problem. I tried the utility 6bitdac.com to fake a 6-bit vs 8-bit DAC and this made no difference. All menus options worked, the intro animation was fine, but when I selected a new game character to start. It accepted all "new character", started to load the game, got almost to the end of the progression screen, but then crashed with a fault back to DOS. I was running the game from a 512mb RAMDRIVE in pure DOS 7.1. Perhaps I'm missing some files. The only files present, in the root directory are:
CWSDPMI.EXE
DEVX.EXE
DEVX.MPQ (5.414.788 bytes)
and DIABDAT.MPQ (517.501.242 bytes).

No other files or directories are present.

There were several resolutions listed in the "settings" menu. I had resolutions listed up to 1920x1080. But changing to any one other than 640x480 made the game freeze. No crash, just system freeze.

Strangely, when I try to EXIT using the game menu, the system freezes, no return to DOS prompt.

Interestingly, it failed on two other laptops (one with Intel i5-3420 CPU and onboard GPU, and another with Intel I7-5600 with Intel HD onboard GPU, with the error log reporting (SDL VBE mode error(1)-unable to initialize.

So close, but so far.... Are there any further suggestions to get it to load a start a new game character?

Awesome news!
The DOS port of diablo was in 15.9.2026 updated. The key improvement is this:

display.cpp:
#if defined(USE_SDL3) && defined(__DJGPP__)
        SDL_SetHint(SDL_HINT_DOS_ALLOW_DIRECT_FRAMEBUFFER, "1");
#endif

Now the performance dramaticaly improved. The FPS increased from 0,8-1,1 to 106-107!

Finally is the DOS Diablo perfectly playable.

Link to binary: here.

---
DOS-u-akbar!