So i'm unable to port forward but as i remember from the old days i was pretty fast with the escape and enter key attempting to connect over and over again and always eventually i'd be able to connect to battle.net with out port forwarding? does anyone know why that is?

my other question is sometime when I connect to battle.net i get the classic feature of the users, games etc and start in diablo retail-1 but i have never seen another player on the server.

well sometimes when i connect i get greeted differently, i get place in void, with the option of joining and creating games(not like connecting with the UDP error), but i don't get greeted with the classic diablo greeting, active games and users. i get greeted with asking me to set my email for my character etc.

here is a screen shot of the stealth bot connecting into the void, both servers are us west,

You were crudely implementing NAT hole punch by hand. Setting up port forwarding would be a better choice, particularly since your trick got the client to think it could host, but nobody would be able to join your games.The server greeting messages in the screenshot don't look like Blizzard's battle.net to me. I suspect you're using some third-party server, which may have an even smaller player base than Blizzard's battle.net.

You are connecting to the slashdiablo server. Some of us used that in-between the time when classic battle.net was taken off line and before GOG started hosting the global server. I would encourage you to set your gateway to "global" for the best user experience.

Ok I see that I was connected to slash.

When ever I edit to registry to connect to gig servers I’m unable to successfully run the in game bnet update.
I get a battle.snp error on the checksum. I have reinstalled and run the bnet update on a fresh install and same thing.

Do I have to have the gog version to connect to battle net?

I have a disk copy of diablo.

I also tried to purchase the gog diablo to no success, I kept getting errors And haven’t heard back from their support.

the Gog package should work on b.net out of the box. if your installing from a CD and want to connect to global (gog) battle.net follow the directions here:

https://d1legit.com/2019/04/04/diablo-1-connecting-to-battle-net-gog-net-with-v1-09b/

I would not attempt to connect to any of the legacy servers at this point. The above is confirmed to still be working.