Anybody from the community that enjoyed Diablo II, and wants to experience it like never before should check out MedianXL. If you've played it you know it's awesome, and if you haven't you're missing out on an awesome game.
The mod is totally free to play, and there are dedicated servers hosting it online so you can actually play outside of LAN/IP games. Below I will include a link to a Onedrive folder that contains every single file you need in order to play the game to it's full potential as well as instructions on how to get it all setup.
Mount the game ISOs, run the setup. Once you get the game installed DO NOT RUN IT and proceed to follow the next few steps carefully.
Right click the icon on the desktop and make sure the target line looks like the following:
The important part of this step is making sure that the '-3dfx' flag makes it on to the end of the target line.
Once this is done go to the Compatibility tab and apply the following settings:
Extract the entire contents of 'gl32ogl14e.zip' into the install directory, and then run glide-init. This is a glide wrapper that will spoof the game into thinking your gpu supports 3dfx Glide(which the game was originally optimized for)
Inside of glide init I use the following settings:
The goal is that when you click the "Test" button in the glide wrapper, the window spans the entire panel, and has optimal framerate as well as resolution.
Extract the entire contents of the "rollback" folder into the install directory for the game. Once this is done run the file 'LODPatch_113c'.
After the patch has been applied, extract the contents of "ultimative_xvi" into the install directory, overwriting the patch_d2.mpq file that is already present in the directory.
At this point the mod has been installed and you can play it single player with full graphical capability. The following steps will allow you to play online via "The Sin War" servers.
Extract BNGatewayEditor to anywhere you like(probably just stick with install directory), run the application, and click the Diablo2 Tab on the bottom. Select "Add Gateway" and add:
Name: TSW
Zone: 1
IP: 37.221.195.51
Once this is done, select "Set to Chosen Gateway" and then "Detect Gateway" for good measure to make sure you get a response.
It should look like this:
Once you launch the game now it should be apparent that you're not playing normal D2, as the menu screen is entirely different. Just select multiplayer and create an account to start playing with other people that are enjoying the mod as well.
The only other thing you should probably do at this point is navigate inside of the LOD CD while it's mounted, and copy over all of the MPQ files inside of it to your install directory. Choose to ignore any that it already has. This will make it so that you no longer need the CDs mounted in order to play the game.
[ Link to all needed files here ]
Keys are up to you to obtain, however you should note that the mod server doesn't check keys so basically any valid key will work, even if it's been banned from Battle.net. (I used Google image search for keys to install the mod with)
There's extensive documentation to the game available here.
Community Website/Forum is here.
Gameplay video: