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Fan Completes Reverse-Engineering of Source Code for ‘Diablo’
The original Diablo is still very much a favorite of mine 20 years after its release. There’s just something amazingly fun about this dungeon-crawler that sticks with me even today. And I’m not the only one, as the modding community has constantly been tinkering and toying with the original and its sequels to come up with some pretty cool things. Know what else is cool? Someone finally managed to reverse-engineer the source code!
A coder by the handle of GalaxyHaxz spent over 1,200 hours over the course of 6-12 months to obtain the source code with his project, “Devilution”. Keep in mind that this source code won’t give you a free copy of the original game when you compile it (even though Blizzard stopped updating and selling the original back in 2001). The whole point of the reverse-engineering was to make things easier for the modding community when it comes to creating their mods.
“For years mod-makers had to rely on tedious code editing and memory injection. A few even went even further and reversed a good chunk of the game,” explains GalaxyHaxz. “The problem is that they never released their sources. Usually being a one-man job, they move on with their lives inevitably due to the amount of time/work required or lack of interest. This leaves people with a half-finished mod; one which had countless hours put into it, but left full of bugs and unfinished potential. So we’re back to square one. Devilution aims to fix this, by making the source code of Diablo freely available to all.”
As the goal was to reproduce the 1996 code as accurately as possible, bugs and all, there’s a unique bonus with this: Fans get a look at the development of the game. For those that don’t know, development of Diablo was rushed near the end, with many ideas being scrapped and the multiplayer component being a quick hack job. “By examining the source, we can see various quirks of planned development.”
All of us here at Bloody Disgusting are deeply saddened to learn that George A. Romero Foundation Founder and President Suzanne Desrocher-Romero has passed away.
GARF shared in a statement on socials, “It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Suzanne Desrocher Romero. Suzanne passed away of natural causes on June 24 at her home in Toronto after a prolonged illness.”
The statement continues, “Suzanne was the fierce leader of the George A. Romero Estate and The George A. Romero Foundation. She worked tirelessly to preserve George’s legacy. Her work at the foundation will continue to inspire and live on for generations to come. The family asks for privacy at this time.”
Desrocher-Romero founded GARF in 2018, after her late husband’s passing in 2017, and has been a fierce advocate for his legacy and the arts. It was her mission to “strengthen horror as a serious field of global study,” and she was a tremendous fighter on behalf of Romero’s works and supporting new filmmakers inspired by his legacy.
It was Desrocher-Romero who spearheaded the recovery and restoration of The Amusement Park, and, as the person in charge of the George A. Romero estate, worked closely with author Daniel Kraus on completing unfinished novels like Pay the Piper and The Living Dead. She most recently celebrated the restoration of her favorite of Romero’s zombie films, Day of the Dead, and was hard at work producing the upcoming film Twilight of the Dead.
That passionate advocacy led to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero becoming family to Bloody Disgusting as well.
2023 marked the start of an ongoing partnership between Bloody FM and GARF on The Dead, a scripted audio series spanning multiple seasons that saw Desrocher-Romero working closely with the Bloody FM team and mentoring the series’s contributing writers with GARF. To say her loss will be felt internally is an understatement.
“Anytime George Romero is mentioned is good, because what we are doing is to provide a healthy legacy. We’re uplifting his legacy, we’re supporting the archive, and we’re also supporting the Horror Study Center. So, all of these three things are what the Foundation is striving to do. As far as I’m concerned, the more we say George Romero’s name, the better it is,” Desrocher-Romero recently told BD.
It’s the perfect encapsulation of her unwavering enthusiasm for supporting Romero’s legacy and the horror genre, and just a glimpse at how much she contributed to preserving it. She is, in short, an inspiration.
We send our deepest condolences to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero’s family, friends, and GARF.
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