A guy who calls himself SnaiperX (yes, there's an "a" in there) created something he calls the Diablo II Loader, which allows you to load and play the game without the CD. Yes, it's a crack, but most moral issues are settled by the fact that you need to have the game already fully installed before it will work, so you do need to have the original disks. After reading many horror stories about exploding CDs and disk drive failures, because the game takes a pretty heavy toll both on your drives and the disk itself, I tried it out, and I love it.

Besides bypassing the inconvenience of having to keep the D2X CD in the drive all the time (although mine pretty much lived there all the time anyways), it also starts the game up much faster, because it's reading from the hard drive and not a CD. That means you get to the business of slaying Hell's Minions much faster, and that's a good thing.

I do not endorse hacks of any kind, but this is a crack, and there is a difference. The gameplay itself is not changed in any way, you just get to it faster and don't need to keep your drive occupied all the time. Technology is a wonderful thing.

How to Download

That's what you really want to know, I'm sure. Well, you missed it. You could've just clicked on the words "Diablo II Loader" at the top of this page. That's a link to a .zip file of everything you need. Here is another link. Just download it, unzip it, and follow the instructions in the included .rtf file. Yes, I could reprint them all here, but then you'd have no reason to read the .rtf, which includes some credits for SnaiperX, to which he is most definitely entitled. So read them, and everyone will be happy.