Is it the developers and IP owners or is it GOG who patch the games? Been wondering since it's a bit of a hard task to me. The internals of Win 95/98 are completely different to the NT line.

By "patching" I suppose you mean "makes old games work on new systems"?

If so, I believe it's up to GOG to get shit working. If memory serves, Timeslip - the guy who fixed Crimson Skies for post-XP Windowses - has admitted helping them out on a freelance basis, which suggests that GOG outsources all or part of the work.

I'm guessing a bit of both depending on what part is patched.

GOG for the dosbox type stuff and devs for more internal game patching.

Actually with things like Gothic 3 there's even an amount of fan patching, too.

It's impressive work like. I just thought that the developers who owned it would have to patch some for them to work.

Quite often GOG uses fan-made updates, knowledge and cracks to make the game playable on new systems. In fact, with many retail games it is the copy protection that fails on new Windows versions, meaning that merely applying a crack to the game (ie. removing the copy protection) makes the game playable again. That applies to many retail games with e.g. older Starforce or TAGES copy protection, the copy protection was meant for Windows 9x or XP.

But there is still work for GOG there too, like applying all that in a mix that seems to work the best for most, creating proper installers for the game, doing the Q&A work, and of course providing support.

I'm just guessing of course, only GOG staff can tell for sure what exactly their technical work includes.

The Patch Fairy of course! Duh!

Who patches the games?
It's one of these guys:

It's mixed.
Some of them, like the wrappers of the audio CD music to MP3 files, are from gog.com. Some stuff is from paid freelancers ( for [url=http://www.gog.com/forum/dungeon_keeper_series/dungeon_keeper_2_hardware_acceleration_fix_is_now_live]DKII and more games, someone else?) some stuff is available from the community (cracks and , like the recent [url=http://www.gog.com/forum/outcast/how_outcast_would_look_played_in_high_res_ingame_screenshots_inside]Out-Cast fixes or for ). And some are made by the original developers on source code level. I remember that on the first release of Divine Divinity Larian "remastered" the game for GOG. Also, before the Arx Fatalis release the developer gave the game a final patch (and open sourced it too) Interestingly, Arx Fatalis is now maintained by the community at [url=http://arx-libertatis.org/]Arx Libertatis

While this support is great, I have one issue with the current gog approach: enforced prepatching
Sometimes it would be preferable if I get the vanilla version and have the choice myself to which version I upgrade.
As example where this leads to problems: DKII is prepatched by GOG to 1.7 with a broken AI, where 1.51 or 1.3 would be preferable (in this case downgrading is harder than exchanging the executable as the map format was changed).

PS: If someone think further game support is important, he/she can vote here for the wish that GOG should try to obtain the sources.

And every time they succeed, they get a little visit from <span class="bold">these guys</span>.

Oh man, thank god I quit smoking!

From cig to LSD. I don't know what's worse......

Someone needs to see a Dr....

I know that Omikron's patches that got it to work on modern systems were done by a modder outside GOG, same guy who made the Morrowind Graphics Extender, sfall for Fallout 2, among many things....

*Ah* also , wasn't aware that Omikron was also fixed by timeslip. It seems to be always timeslip ;P ([url=http://timeslip.users.sourceforge.net/]timeslip's page with more patches for Crimson skies, Septerra Core, Summoner...).

Care to explain who that guy (tech.png) actually is? I had seen that picture a couple of times but never learned who he is.

Oh, and I don't want to hijack this thread, but let me use this opportunity to post that I really hope someday GOG can patch Project Eden to work on Win 8.