It used to be included in the battlechest, but I don't believe that's the case any more. Since it hasn't got DRM, people at least have the theoretical option of overpaying to get it on eBay. No idea how much it costs.

I liked it, but the resolution, is very small with the default engine, and so you do a ton of scrolling. WC2 is a much better game in most respects.

I've got the Battlechest. The thing that pisses me off is you could go on and download the Orc portion of Frozen Throne but they have either eliminated that or my OS just refuses to download it.

I believe the downloadable installer you can get on battle.net (you can get it by registering your serial key) comes patched, so that could solve your problem.

Great news, thanks amok.

Time to polish the shotgun!

"polish the shotgun"
Is that what they're calling it now?

Unfortunately they removed the configuration utility. On some configs, music through MIDI device + sound effects through SB emulation = just sound effects and no music :(

The 2 acts of Orc campaign were included in a patch. There was no separate download for them (at least that was the case for the boxed version).

Yes, you need to patch in order to get acts 2 and 3 of the Orc campaign. Just click the "multiplayer" button and the game should automatically patch.

There is one other way to get a patched version; if you register your serial keys on battle.net you can get a stand-alone installer. I believe the installers for their older games (ie, before WoW) are both DRM-free and fully-patched.

Cool. Thanks for the heads-up. I actually played through Blackthorne on a GBA some years ago. Only ever played the original demo on PC. Should be fun giving it a whirl again. :)
*raises hand*

Or just download a patch from here.

Thanks for informing us, amok. +1

Only if you can call it a shotgun. ;-)

Thanks for having a sense of humor about that. :P

Wow, like GOG DOS games, then? Even to the point of not needing a client to install and run, but has to be installed using an installer, like in the old times? :)

I tried this version, very nice gesture from Blizzard. Too bad the sound is set by default to the nasty sounding Adlib music. My ears are hurting... The game (at least the original version) supports also far superior Roland Sound Canvas music, so I urge everyone at least to try to change the game sound settings to "Roland Sound Canvas" or "General MIDI", and preferably also install BASSMIDI + a good General MIDI soundfont like Chorium Rev.A, because the default Windows GM soundfont is rather poor (but still far better than the crappy Adlib music that is playing by default). You won't believe how much better this game will sound that way.

So this is how the game is really supposed to sound: <span class="bold">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYdhh5RjSuY</span>

Recent GOG DOS games at least seem to add a shortcut to change the sound source settings, which is very nice. I wish this version had the same.

One odd thing with this game though: whenever I run it, for some reason it keeps forcing the sound output to my HDMI cable (TV speakers), even if I changed it to my Logitech V20 USB speakers that are connected to the PC. So I had to disconnect the HDMI cable, otherwise the game would be silent to me. Does that depend on some DOSBox setting? The same does not happen if I run the original Blackthorne on vanilla DOSBox.

yours is a sawn off no?