Restoring Diablo II Single Player Characters

You don't need any application to load it as far as I know.  I used to use a "cheat", if you will, with a character that I spent a ton of time building and loaded up with as many perfect gems, perfect items, and so forth as possible.  All that I needed to do to "restore" the character with fully loaded gems was to copy the four files back into the characters directory, whatever that is, then go into a multiplayer game, take the gems from the character, exit the multiplayer game, copy the files back and - viola! - I can use whatever other perfect gems/skulls I want to enhance my weaponry.  I never needed to use any kind of application to do that.

My nephew has also brought his character over to my house just by bringing his character files over, and I always created backups of my character after every game just in case something happened or I made a bad decision in the game.  All that we had to do was to drag the files into the characters directory and that was it.

The biggest concern to me is that the names that you list above don't completely match what I have for my "perfect gems" character.  The filenames I have use the following extensions (the file sizes might be slightly different for each character) --

- *.2ds (2,277 bytes)
- *.key (902 bytes)
- *.ma0 (4,914 bytes)
- *.map (24 bytes)

I've never heard of .da1 or .da2 so I don't know what those do.  They might be specific to single player, but I've restored my single-player character using the same method I mention above. I'd check again and make sure that you have the four files above.  If the four that you restored have identical or near-identical file sizes, you can also try changing the extension to match what I have above.

On the bright side, Diablo II is such an awesome game, would it really be THAT much of a problem to go back from the beginning?  Maybe this is a good excuse to try a different character class!

Good luck!

Thanks so much for the help but neither solutions worked.  For some reason, those files (and I misspelled them when I posted the question - sorry) just refuse to be recognized as a character.  I've tried both solutions without any success.  But thanks for replying.

;)

This didn't work but Widescreen John's explanation was really great.  Thanks for your help anyway.  ;)

Under the Diablo II main folder, there is a folder named SAVE where all of the character files are kept.  If you put the character file there you will be able to play the character.  If the SAVE folder has not been backed up elsewhere on your hard drive, then unfortunately you are toast.  I would suggest backing up the SAVE folder somewhere either on your hard drive or on a CD every so often so that you can restore it if necessary.