Got to Flamespike! And finished Act 1; something somewhere after 1.06b I feel vastly changed drops:
- I cleared every map; A1 was demon-free Blood Moor to Catacombs 4
- Stash size wasn’t an issue; I mainly stored gems and picked up only 15 in all of A1
- 1.14d classic and LoD I had tons of gems A1, stash-filled, and even had to sell some
- I ran out of locked-chest Keys occasionally 1.06b; they drop and replenish enough 1.14d+ to not need to buy any
- Item sell prices are way lower overall; throwing knives aren’t ez bank, no 5K wands/staffs, and I wasn’t able to afford gambling yet (end of A1 I had 60K)
A2 is gonna be interesting 
Some tech stuff with wrappers:
- Sven’s Glide wrapper left Game.exe running in the background on game exit (seems specific to that wrapper only on Windows)
- Fedora 41 Workstation Linux/Wine + Sven wrapper worked fine (no Game.exe lingering on exit; also seemingly fine GNOME 47/Wayland/Staging 10.0; all other feedback is from Win10)
- dgVoodoo and nGlide Glide wrappers are fine (I use nGlide for more-simple settings but dgVoodoo had better minimize/restore/FS behavior)
- I think Sven’s wrapper had higher default gamma than nGlide, but I’m not entirely sure how it’s intended to look/reference
- narzoul/DDrawCompat (DDraw) loads and min/restores D2 the fastest by a long shot! (no symbol spam top-left) It had significant color banding compared to nGlide though (Catacombs 2 WP)
- Creative ALchemy Universal, DSOAL, and IndirectSound load fine; I’m not sure how to test environment/3D audio in D2 though so I don’t use any currently (IndirectSound apparently only fakes EAX support)
I’m fine with nGlide but still curious about different audio solutions.