Installation

Personal use only

d2vita distributes neither a VPK nor game files. This page assumes a legitimately-owned copy of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, on personal Vita hardware. See the legal notice on the home page.

Game files

d2vita contains no Blizzard file. 1.13c is retired — only the genuine 1.14d executables and MPQs are supported. Both go together, exactly like a real PC install, under a 1.14d subfolder (the loader reads from there specifically, not from ux0:data/d2vita/ directly):

ux0:data/d2vita/1.14d/
├── Game.exe
├── d2data.mpq      (required)
├── d2exp.mpq       (required, LoD expansion)
├── patch_d2.mpq    (recommended — 1.14d patch)
├── d2char.mpq
├── d2sfx.mpq
├── d2music.mpq
├── d2speech.mpq    (voice — content is per-language, filename never changes)
├── d2video.mpq
├── d2xmusic.mpq
├── d2xtalk.mpq
└── d2xvideo.mpq

That's the full list. 1.14d ships as a single monolithic Game.exe with everything statically linked in — d2vita never reads Fog.dll, Storm.dll, D2Win.dll, D2Client.dll, D2Common.dll or D2gfx.dll from disk, even though a PC install ships them alongside it.

Your copy of the folder may still contain those split DLLs and a few extra launchers (Diablo II.exe, BNUpdate.exe, SystemSurvey.exe, BlizzardError.exe) — a whole PC/Mac install usually does. That's fine: d2vita ignores them. It never loads a stray 1.13c DLL next to the 1.14d monolith (loading that old, incompatible code is what used to break rendering or crash the boot — d2vita now refuses to). You can delete them to tidy the folder if you like, but you don't have to; only Game.exe, the MPQs and your .key files actually do anything.

On every boot, d2vita checks that Game.exe and each required MPQ above actually exist, and writes down exactly which one is missing if any is — see Verifying the install below for where that check is recorded.

Nothing else needs to be supplied: ddraw.dll, checkrevision.dll and d2vhost.dll are all faked or shimmed by d2vita itself, never read from disk. glide3x.dll — d2vita's own Glide renderer, which the game genuinely does LoadLibrary from disk (D2 is launched with -3dfx) — travels inside the VPK (app0:glide3x.dll, build_rt_boot_vpk.sh), so you do not supply it either. Same for ux0:data/d2vita/shaders/ — the precompiled GPU shaders already travel inside the VPK. A copy of glide3x.dll or of a shader in the game folder is only an optional on-console override, not something a normal install needs to populate.

CD keys (optional) go one level up, flat in ux0:data/d2vita/keys.txt — see Online play.

Getting the VPK

Download d2vita.vpk from the Releases page — each release is built and published automatically by CI.

Building from source instead (for development, or to track main between releases) is documented in the repository README; the result lands at build-vita/d2vita.vpk.

Installing on the console

Install the VPK with VitaShell, like any homebrew.

Configuration (env.txt)

The runtime's behavior is configured through an env.txt file placed alongside the MPQs (ux0:data/d2vita/env.txt), one variable per line. The chosen game configuration is documented in Native ports and measured gains — tools/bancs/env_jeu_glide.txt is its reference version, to be copied as-is for normal play (not a measurement bench).

The play environment (perf/config) and the diagnostic environment (D2_INPUTLOG, profiling probes, etc.) are kept separate — don't enable the latter for normal use, they have a cost.

One flag lives outside that reference block on purpose: D2_LOCAL_ONLY=1 restricts the runtime to a private/local server instead of official Battle.net, which is the default. It's a network-policy choice, not a performance lever, so it isn't part of the config above — add it to env.txt yourself if you want it. Details: Online play.

Verifying the install

Every boot writes a plain-text log to:

ux0:data/d2vita/boot_progress.txt

Read it with VitaShell's built-in text viewer, or pull it over FTP — it is a file, not an on-screen message. If Game.exe or any required MPQ (see above) is missing, the very first lines name exactly which file and the full path it was expected at, before the game gives up. If the game closes right after launch and the MPQ list above looks right, this file is the first thing to check.

A boot that stops silently with nothing at all written to this file — not even those first lines — usually means the console itself is stuck in an inconsistent state rather than a bad install: reboot before digging further (a documented project pitfall: an empty log doesn't mean the previous binary booted correctly).