use 'ALT-TAB' or 'CTRL-ESC' or Windows Key to get out of D2 or LOD

copy this special d2gfx.dll into the diablo II directory backup or rename the original d2gfx.dll Do not change this, you'll need to use it as well.) (Your normal game start shortcut points to 'diabloii.exe'. Make a new shortcut pointing to game.exe in the diablo directory. It's a handy way to mule items in SP without getting a friend to host or go to open (ack) bnet. So now we can play D2 on the network here with the XP benefit of 3 extra players without the crap associated with playing with unknown goobers. Mine is an w/ 512mb, and 3 each is about as far as I can go and not impact on how D2 runs on the primary machine. Then I thought, if one works, why not try more? Works fine, to the limit of your primary machine. I just made an extra character under XP then restarted the Win98 game and joined the XP game.voila! Fired up Diablo and it ran! I couldn't create characters, but I could join games using existing characters (I was getting a not-enough-disk-space error.something to do with the way VPC handles partitions I think, but maybe a security setting on my share). Then I shared my Diablo2 dir (under WinXP) and connected the virtual Win98 machine to the share. Anyway, after mucking with Mandrake for a while, I popped Win98 on just for kicks. It's kind of like VMWare, but I find it faster and better behaved on the networking side of things.

I've been playing around with Connectix VirtualPC for the last little while. Dunno if this has been done before, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

Diablo 2 single player commands