I have my old disc for Diablo 1, and it sorta works. I’ve loaded it on my windows 10 machine and sometimes it runs smoothly and sometimes it crashes randomly. I know the game has been rereleased on GoG and includes patches for modern systems, but I was wondering if there was a way to redeem my existing copy without having to rebuy the game.
There’s no way to redeem D1 to an account because it was never given a cd-key authentication system. If you still own a legit copy, there’s no need to buy the GoG version. It just comes with a ddraw file that somewhat helps the U.I glitching on battle.net and reduces the likelihood of the game crashing upon minimizing , which you can easily acquire otherwise here: https ://archive.org/download/diablo.iso.
If you want to play on the new Gateway that GoG setup, you can manually configure it into your registry using your cd-rom copy: https ://d1legit.com/2019/04/04/diablo-1-connecting-to-battle-net-gog-net-with-v1-09b/
Using your original copy is better, because you can use it to log into both the original gatways (US West/East, Europe,Asia) and the new one. However, if you use the GoG copy, it prevents you from being able to log into the old ones.
One a side note, playing Diablo 1 is so much better if you can run it on Windows 98, 2000, or XP. These days, if your computer can handle it, you can use a virtual machine to install and run one of these older operation systems.