🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 05 Jul 2013 22:01:50 GMT, john...@frontier.com (John Lewis)
wrote:

>On Sat, 06 Jul 2013 00:24:37 +0400, "Andrew Rybenkov"
><aryb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On Sat, 06 Jul 2013 00:03:59 +0400, John Lewis <john...@frontier.com> wrote:
>>
>>> updated for modern
>>> OS
>>
>>do you believe this crap yourself?
>>
>>No kidding, do you believe they have sources for all games they sell,
>>or maybe they disassembly .com/.exe's?
>>
>>How without reprogramming you can modify a program to run on "modern systems"
>>(if it did not run initially)?
>>
>
>Access to source-code, use DOSBox and/or hand-modify the .exes and/or
>.dlls?  Who cares?.... as long as the game run flawlessly and the
>presence of the enabler is completely buried in the GOG-installer,
>which it is...  And, remember, GOG requires a DRM-free image, so 
>they may well have to go in and reverse-engineer game executables or
>dlls from developers long since vanished.
>
>You may not know, but GOG.com is an offshoot of CDProjekt Red, the
>Witcher developer, so I'm sure GOG has access to some pretty competent
>game programmers if needed. Some games that require more than DOSbox
>or "Setting to XP/98/whatever mode" have been fixed by GOG.  Quantic
>Dreams  classic "Omikron" (originally releaed for Win98/ME) in its
>original CD form had sluggish UI and froze up completely on the Map
>screen under WinXP also  refused to run on Win7, The GOG release runs
>just fine in XP and Win7-64 on the latest hardware..

FWIW, typically the type of skills required to get older software
working on updated OS would not involve anything like disassembling
.exes or some other things that might have been fantasized about in
this thread.  Furthermore, that sort of "development" is much more
along the lines of all-out hacking, a completely different type of
development from the guys that develop modern games.  It's rarely a
case of whether or not a developer "is good" or not anymore, it's a
matter of what are that particular developers specialities, and how
does his skillset match the tasks ahead of him? 

Anyway most of the success stories from Steam and GOG repackaged games
is simply a matter of re-working the installation.  This can typically
be done by a QA tech, or in more elaborate shops they will have a
dedicated configuration manager / build guy type of person (or persons
on larger projects) that is in charge of making sure the installation
provides broad coverage of typical modern OSes.

If there was really a problem in an .exe of a game that cannot be
overcome by relatively simple configuration changes, you most likely
won't see that game ever appear on GOG, Steam etc.

That would be rare though, with things like DOSbox.  Not to mention
Windows itself has a pretty amazing level of backward compatibility,
since Windows 8 will in some cases run DOS shit from the 80s.  No
other operating system on the planet comes close to that.