All Original Diablo 1 & 2 Patches Now Available!

[fearedbliss]

Hello all,

As you all know, many years ago I made Bliss Version Switcher, and subsequently made Cactus as a complete upgrade and rewrite to BVS. You also already know that the "Bliss Complete Collection" was just BVS + all of the already extracted files from all of the versions. Cactus already included all of these same files as well and there is no distinction between both since Cactus is a historical archive of all of the versions of the game. However, today I'm releasing (and mirroring) all of the original updater files that I used to create the archive in the first place. I'm doing this in order to allow people that don't care about using or setting up Cactus, a way to download the specific patch that they want, and secondly, in order to allow people to audit the Cactus version files. Everything should be identical and in their vanilla state except for two files:

1. Game.exe - Cactus contains GalaXyHaXz's Unsecuromed (No-CD) executable. This is the same as what Blizzard did with 1.12 so that people don't need to use a CD anymore (Especially given modern machines don't come with a built in CD rom drive anymore). This also has always been documented in the Cactus Documentation.
2. Patch_D2.mpq - The way that the updater works (from my experience and observations) is that it essentially is snowballing the updates as you apply them over time. Which means that the more patches you apply, the bigger the Patch_D2.mpq will become. Back in 2013, I first extracted the files in a file optimized way so that I could keep the Patch_D2.mpq sizes as low as possible, and thus have the smallest possible size for the entire archive (Essentially doing a sort of starting at a base patch like 1.00 or 1.07, and then applying each patch, backing up the files in between patch updates, and then reverting back to the base patch and re-doing this again: 1.00 -> 1.01, 1.00 -> 1.02, 1.00 -> 1.03, etc, 1.07 -> 1.08, 1.07 -> 1.09, etc).

I'm also releasing all of the Diablo 1 Retail (Not shareware) Patches as well (including the only Hellfire patch that Synergistic Software / Sierra released - Hellfire 1.01). However, Due to the Hellfire Updater (hf101.exe) being completely broken on 64 bit systems (The updater will not open up at all), I've used the application "UniExtract" to force open the .exe and extract the files myself. Therefore, all you need to do is copy the files in the "extracted" directory and replace the equivalent files that were originally installed by Hellfire when you first installed the game, which should be at version 1.00. I'm also providing the original unextracted .exe for historical archiving purposes and also in case anyone needs to do any security file verification checks and cross reference the files I've provided. They should both be identical and in a vanilla state.

I encourage anyone interested to download all of the patches and create your own mirror as well.

Original Patch Updater Archives

- fearedbliss