Add original installers as optional extras?

It would be wasted money from GOG part to create installers for old OS's. I know some people do like to keep their old hardware and OS's in running shape, but I don't think there would be enough warrant for backwards compatible installers to justify creating one.

Thanks! Will look into that.
That would work too.

Actually, some games come with an original iso image already. You have to install the game, find the image, rename the extension (usually gog) to iso, and install from the image (burn to a disc or use a virtual drive) directly on Windows 98/ME.

You can try that way if you want to play on a pre-XP Windows without a wrapper. I don't think the wishlist request will be fullfilled any time soon.

Might need some nocd cracks for some of those games though.

If GOG did that it would be tantamount to supporting those OS and all that that implies. GOG does need to increase its OS support, but in a forwards direction, not back.

Oh and if GOG are making changes to the games to make them run on newer hardware then that means providing a whole separate version of the game for older OS. Not just an installer.

All in all it's too much work with next to no recompense.

This is a valid point. Which makes me wonder whether it would be viable to include them on an as-is with no support offered basis. The people who'd need them are few and if they have old machines they are likely the kind of people who know their way about old OS.

I'm not arguing but genuinly wondering whether such an arrangement will work. Or whether it will create too many problems from people who'll insist GOG offers them support anyway.

But they have them already. They get the original installation media and then they add Dosbox or other wrappers to them. In fact, as I said lots of games contain already contain an iso image of the original installer.
If it's an issue of copyright holders not supplying it to GOG then I can understand it. But for many games they already have it.

Just to be clear: ^I'm referring to the original installation media (CD or floppy images) which GOG usually has. This is a different issue from the OP who asked for a GOG installer compatible with older Windows, which I agree might not be easy to provide.

I wish they provided games as a zip file instead of installers.

Just unpack and play on any OS that can run the game. Some humble bundle games are like that.

Many games were like that before, DOS and windows games and programs. It's the more recent Win32/Windows 95 Registry based access that usually has dozens of entries or special instructions in order to get the software running. Some of my favorite programs come only in a zip format, and run anywhere, like VirtualDub, AutoHotKeys, emulators, etc.


Actually i'd rather Microsoft's Management of Filesystems and digitally signing drivers wasn't so anal, then a SquashFS driver port might be made; Ignore the installer, just mount a file as a CD and run from there, no install needed, and only configuration and save files would be stored locally. I remember when SquashFS was being developed back in it's v1.2 days, and i did testing and experimenting. Managed to compress an entire laptop's /bin /usr directories to SquashFS and mount them, saved hundreds of megs of space on my limited hard drive size.

Course the overhead of decompressing constantly vs say extracting to a drive/ramdrive does have it's overhead...

Not necessarily. I wouldn't mind original installers/iso or even zipped dos games without official support. Many users here or even others forums can answer most questions. Most with older machines already know how to fix most issues themselves.

Or some not so well known fixes...

I recall back when there was Unreal Tournament (1999) my dad built a wonderful rig, a top of the line AMD 800Mhz Rig. Was quite awesome at the time.

Anyways... seemed the video card didn't like him because drivers didn't match up between the interface and his game. Quite confusing. I ended up finding an odd fix where i replaced the opengl.dll files in the installation folder (300k) with another set from the video drivers or another program (60k), and it worked like a dream...

Still have no idea what the real problem was... the API apparently was the same...

You're still thinking about this from the standpoint of what you could do yourself as opposed to what GOG can do as a company. First and foremost there are the legal issues. GOG would have to renegotiate for every game they provide these installers for. Not least of all because a lot of the old installers are licensed from third parties (Installshield).

At the very least they'd need to check it all out and make sure it's OK. That means a lot of time and money even before any work is put in. I don't know how many hundreds of 9x era games GOG has but... oh fuck it. I'm done explaining why this is a ludicrous pipe dream.

I'm not. You're mixing my points. The "they have them already" was a reply to the argument that they would have to provide/create separate installers/version of the game for old OSs. I'm well aware that legal issues is a separate matter, and I've inquired about it in a few other posts, e.g. here.

Again, I'm talking about a scenerio where they just provide everything as is, so that means without checking that everything is ok. Just upload it and let the user worry about getting it to work. If there are legal issues that prevent this then I understand, but from a technical point of view it doesn't involve a lot of time and money.

3D Realms did that by the way. Released some of its games as freeware over the years, stating that they will NOT be providing any support.

You're wanting an extreme niche capability here. There are already ways around this that don't need GOG to do anything--see Installing GOG.com Windows games on Windows 98 retro gaming PCs.

GOG won't simply put up a zip etc. of the game files since some customers would inevitably download that and then complain to support about the game not working. It simply isn't worth confusing a large number of customers just to make things more convenient for a tiny number of customers.

Except it's 3DRealms and it's free. Quite a difference from GOG and purchased. Seriously, didn't we have that exact same discussion just a few weeks ago? Nothing's changed since then, so go and re-read all the potential problems and considerations that would go into this. The installer isn't really your problem. Once you install to a modern OS, you can just copy the folder and it will generally work. A few cases might require copying registry keys. Also, you'll need the old versions of relevant software like DirectX or QuickTime.

Your real problem is with the game executables themselves. Many games have been significantly changed, to the point that they are incompatible with the original OS they were released for (Thief & System Shock 2 come to mind). You'd need original binaries for those, maybe even original resources. And those need to be cracked to avoid the original disc checks and... yeah, not a simple matter, and certainly not when GOG aims to offer tested and working products.

Hmmm... Couldn't they crack out the CD checks and then release the binaries as an extra that you can install? I know a lot of games did CD checks, partly because it was assumed you used the disk so you wouldn't have to install it to your hard drive, and for some games as DRM (Like Diablo 2).