Re: GOG Preserves Old Games... but do they?

On Fri, 22 Nov 2024 14:52:33 +0100, H1M3M <wipnoah@gmail.com> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

 
 
GOG's idea of preservation is focused on rejiggering the code to work
on modern PCs so they can sell it, and I have to wonder... if you
change the game, is it really preserving it? It's one thing if you
take the original game and containerize it in DOSBox or some sort of
virtualization, but GOG --and partners like Nightdive Studios-- more
often create new code entirely.

>

Yes, unfortunately it matters. It's nice being able to play that game on
my modern intel with its modern RTX, but if want to play that "Good old
game" in my "Good Old PC" I'm out of luck:

And it's only going to get worse as time goes on. There's a huge
number of XP era games that I can't play on original hardware (without
semi-legal hacks, at least) thanks to Steam not running on that OS
anymore.

- Original executable is gone and replaced with ScummVM
- The glidewrapper that makes running a game on a modern GPU makes it
incompatible with a real 3DFX card.

Yeah, it's really annoying when they do that. If you're going to use
SCUMM or some other tool like that, they really should also provide
the original executables as well. Even with some DOSBox releases, GOG
only provides the 'necessary files'; sometimes the ISOs themselves are
just dummies used to fake out the game's original copy-protection

     [It was a simpler time; the games just looked to see if the
      disk was in the drive and did very little actual verification
      that the CD itself was legitimate]

For me, ideal preservation would be a combination of the version
prepared to run on modern computers, and a 1:1 ISO copy of the original
CDs the game came in, so that I can play it whatever way I like: Dosbox,
PCem, 86box, full virtualization solution, or old hardware.

It's another Ship of Theseus problem; if you replace this bit and that
bit, is it still the same ship you're preserving?

BTW, this offtopic, but I have new IDE drives for my retroPC, hoping I
can finally hear those games that have CD music again. On ISOS I had to
obtain from internet, because GOG has a bad habit of leaving some ripped
music files in a folder (Pandemonium) and let the music issues to your
own skill.

Heh. I had to similar when I was collecting games to put on the Win98
PC I built last year. I wanted to install a bunch of classic
era-appropriate games on the machine. 'No problem,' I thought; I'll
just use the GOG installers. Except none of them run on the Windows98
operating system, and even most of the game executables aren't
compatible in a lot of cases.

Fortunately, I had the original CDs for pretty much all the games in
question, so I was able to rip them to ISO or BIN/CUE, but it was sort
of annoying that I had to go through those extra steps.