Hello all!

I recently built a new system and as a part of migrating to my new system, I copied my game installations from my old system to the new.

In an age where games seldom need reinstallation, I'm surprised that I can't simply place a GOG game patch in the game's directory and run it from there.

For FEZ and Hammerwatch, I got "Game installation not found, please reinstall."

If these were larger games, like The Witcher 2, I'd be screwed! Is there any way to patch these games without reinstalling? Is there any way to repair the install? If I have an entire library that needed updating, there's no way I'm reinstalling all my games.

Ideas?

I suspect you need to reinstall them. The games may not be in the registry.

Generally you can't just copy programs from one Windows system to another. If it works you're plain lucky. Usually the games write information in the registry and also store informations in the user data folders.
That's the case here, so what you can do is reinstall them and then copy and overwrite the game's folder with your backup copies. If a game stores crucial data (config, saves, achievements) in the user folder, you need to bring a backup of these, too.

If you don't want to fiddle in the registry manually, you've to reinstall, sorry.
By the way, you should uninstall games you've finished to unburden your system. Make backups of your saves if you like. The same applies to all software you don't use, even if it's just for security reasons, because you don't have to track updates anymore.

Yeah, I definitely understand that Windows apps cannot be moved from system to system very cleanly, but I have seen the opposite with many games. Steam works a little differently, but its games are still portable.

Even games I have installed from disc have moved seamlessly from system to system, and are updateable too by simply pointing to the installation path, and then the necessary registry entries are repaired in the process.

It just seems silly to me that after all this time, Windows still depends on the registry to keep track of trivial things like installation paths, and that the system breaks if you lose those registry entries. Makes no sense to me. :/

Ah well, I'll go ahead and reinstall them.

My suggestion for GOG: allow an option for your patchers to point to a directory manually. Most games reside in one directory anyway.

GOG uses the registry quite heavily:
- The gogwrap application, which is used to launch many games* and apply various fixes at runtime, takes the game name (eg. GOGDUKENUKEM12, GOGEARTHWORMJIM1 or GOGBEYONDGOODANDEVIL) as an argument in order to know which game it should launch and then looks it up in the registry.
- Graphic Mode Setup (GOGDOSConfig), that is supplied with all DOSBox games, uses the same game name as an argument to know which game to edit and - again - looks up the location in the registry.
... there's probably a couple other use cases I can't remember right now.

* All DOSBox and ScummVM games, as well as a number of others that require various fixes to be injected at launch time.

Yes, the patches could install to a user-chosen directory and recreate those keys using that directory as a base, but when most games don't have patches anyway, I wonder how useful that would be.

Exactly. With the advent of Steam and portable game installations, it just doesn't make sense anymore to tie it to a system using the registry, or least provide solutions to easily migrate your game installations.

It's simply a consideration within the entire user experience of the service you provide. It pretty darn common for PC gamers to upgrade hardware, install Windows, and get everything nice a fresh again. With new systems, that's unavoidable. So make it less painful to transfer your games from system to system. That's all I'm saying.

There's not much we can do to change the current state of things, so there's probably not a whole lot more to discuss in this thread. Hopefully GOG will have a better solution in the future with this use case in mind.

I'm not sure, you got it right or maybe not Randalator is the "God of Sarcasm", but I ;-)

The thing is though, there needs to be something that contains settings, information on where programs store their resources, etc. Whether that's the registry or something else; if the settings or the location of the resources change, then the thing that stores the information needs to be updated.

Ended with DOS, almost 20 years ago now; however, some programs will recreate their reg entries when you run them. So I would try moving the game, running it and see if that fixes your issues.

Even in the early times of XP games could usually be transferred by simply copying them. That's how I did it back in the day when I left home for university. Today it's basically a coin toss whether your game will work without registry entries (or simply recreate them) or give you the middle finger and refuse to play like a pouting teenager.

as far back as Win 3.1 it was hit or miss. With Win98 it was more miss than hit and it has continued to get progressively worse with each release of Windows. Now, it is up to the developer of course, as they don't have to use the system registry, they can use a sort of local registry instead, but more and more are adapting the system registry.

It will probably always be a bit of hit and miss, unless M$ ever makes the registry a requirement to install a program (wouldn't surprise me TBH)

Of course, most games (even up to Windows XP time) were DOS based, not 100% Windows. Now with Vista and above there is no more DOS (XP had it as legacy support, it was just hidden more than previous versions), and so the registry is used more.