Tell me those are not accurate. It's a win95 game FFS.

The mention "system requirements" is very misleading then. If it's the original files there are no reason it wouldn't work on legacy OS/hardware.
You can't expect people to buy the game just to figure out the actual requirements.

OG version should work with no issues at Pentium 100MHz, 32MB ram and win95 as I played it like that, for modernized one I have no clue, though mentioned specs are sub par even for a cheap tablet PC, if windows 7 runs the game will too

I'm asking for GOG's version, of course. Why would I bother otherwise?

To be clear the question is: Does it actually work as it should or was it artificially butchered to only work on modern windows?

Since Windows 7, released almost 10 years ago, is not a modern OS; yes, "this version on GOG" works as it should.

It might work on XP or lower, I don't know. Maybe someone else here will try it and let you know.

I think we can handle that ;-)

" I'm asking for GOG's version, of course. Why would I bother otherwise?

To be clear the question is: Does it actually work as it should or was it artificially butchered to only work on modern windows?"

Good question. Why would gog withhold support for XP? I think it's be terrible to just cut out support for some users and systems for no reason.., butchered. And all these ppl trying to make excuses makes me feel ill.., I hope someone will report back to us on support for more systems..,

Anyone find it working on XP proper?
Cheers.

Any chances of Diablo being ported to MacOS or Linux?

Being as Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP years ago (April 2014 on their end of support page), then why should GOG (or anyone else for that matter) support software running on Windows XP?

Why should they make it so that software that used to run on versions anterior to even XP (2 generations before actually) wouldn't anymore?

They probably ship it with a custom ddraw.dll that's needed for scaling the game and to solve compatibility issues. Either the tools they're using to compile it don't support anything older than 7 or they're using a new version of DirectX that doesn't run on older versions of windows (Maybe DirectX 11 feature level 9_1?).

Anyways, I don't think it's a problem since they're giving you the original version of the game on top, this one will run fine on older versions of windows. The compatibility tweaks added by the gog version won't be needed if you don't run 7/8/10.

Actually there are chances to get Diablo running with a native engine under Linux or MacOS.

There are three open source engines that work with the original data files. You can view some examples on Youtube.

Engine #1
Devilution
A reversed engineered engine.
https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX

Engine #2
Freeablo
A "modern implementation" of the Diablo 1 engine
https://github.com/wheybags/freeablo

Engine #3
DGEngine
https://github.com/dgengin/DGEngine

You can also try Wine ( https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=73 ) or Playonlinux.

Best regards
Beeco

Because maintaining support for obsolete systems and methods only creates more work, and is inefficient.

64-bit Windows supports 64-bit and 32-bit software (via a kind of emulation), but not 16-bit software as this is so legacy that it got dropped. And this isn't the first instance of an older system being dropped. Windows 98 had a real DOS behind it. Then the real DOS got dropped and replaced with one within Windows running in the command prompt, so a lot of DOS games and programs stopped working with Windows ME and XP, and DOSBox emulates DOS so that we can still play them, just as you can still install virtual machines with older Windows OSes if you really want to. Can you imagine if Microsoft tried to keep support for all their OSes?

Put simply, Windows XP was released 17 years ago with the last release being 10 years ago, and it finally left support 5 years ago. 2 OS generations prior to this would be Windows 98, which was released 20 years ago, had it's latest release 19 years ago and left extended support 13 years ago. If you were writing software (like the latest Windows 10 OS), would you really want to have to consider coding practices and methods from 13 years ago, in addition to everything since then?

People learn for the new technology. If you want to support older technology too then that is additional knowledge that is required and so greater overheads on something that you won't use going forwards. And if you have to code for every possibility then you'll be coding for a very long time and bug-fixing for even longer.

Once upon a time people listened to music on tapes, but then it moved over to CDs and for a while tape decks were still present, but phased out. Now a lot of music is listened to via digital downloads. Tapes and even CDs aren't even catered for on most music players.

The same goes for storage media on computers. Tapes -> 5.25 floppy -> 3.25 floppy -> CD -> DVD -> Blu-ray -> and now there are many PCs without an optical drive at all and instead install Windows from USB or via a set up PCI-e NVMe SSD.