Posted December 09, 2020
I haven't played them much due to a lack of time over the years (work, family, etc.), but also inconvenience. It's a hassle pulling an old game out of storage and then spending hours unsuccessfully trying to get it to work on a modern machine. (I do have a couple of older 98SE/XP machines also in storage that I kept for playing old games, but they mostly collect dust these days).
So, I'd like to simplify things by replacing my old disc-based games with drm-free installers that are easily backed up and (mostly) just work on modern 64-bit Windows 10 machines.
From what I've read, GOG appears to be the best (only?) way to do this. (I should mention that I'm not that interested in Galaxy as I don't care about achievements, cloud saves, etc. I'm only really interested in GOG's 'DRM-Free' standalone installers).
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So my question is: for those of you who've already done this, are these concerns valid? Are there any other pitfalls or gotchas I should be aware of? Or is it all plain sailing?
Please share your experiences, thoughts and views.
I won't address everything you have said, just maybe the more important ones.
I don't like Galaxy and don't use it. However, if you can tolerate the bloat, have a powerful enough PC etc, then it can be used to get the offline installers as well, and it does verify downloads are okay.
That said, most installers from GOG contain MD5 values for internal content and those values are stored inside the installer, and can be checked using a program like InnoExtract. It can be a time consuming process though with very large game files.
On top of that, GOG do have MD5 values for the installer files themselves, not just the content. However, they don't make that easily available, and if not using Galaxy, you need to use a program like gogrepo.py to access those for checking.
These days, because GOG's download speeds and reliability are a bit iffy, I use Download Manager 5 to do the downloading, as it supports resume, and then I use gogrepo.py to do the MD5 checking and zip file integrity checking.
As always, game support will depend on your PC, just like back in the day when you played games, except newer PCs tend to be a bit more powerful and forgiving ... but not always enough, as there are still hardware mismatches, that may work okay with many games, but won't with some. It is still a tough ask for a DEV to make their game work perfect on all the variables out there that PC hardware might be. And of course, PCs have gotten more forgiving of slack or lazy programmers too, but once again not always. Unfortunately we live in the age of bloat, which is nothing more than slack programming.
Post edited December 09, 2020 by Timboli
