🚀 go-pugleaf

Andrew Rybenkov <arybenkov@gmail.com> wrote:
>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)?

GOG.com does do a fair bit of work themselves to get old games working on
modern systems.  Whether that's wraping an old MS-DOS game in DOSBox,
applying official or unofficial patches, or modifying the program
themselves, the games are rarely distributed unmodified from their
original releases.

Using Mike S's Might and Magic VII as an example, the GOG.com version
streams the background music from MP3s on the harddisk.  The original
played its background music directly from the CD-ROM as normal audio
CD tracks.  From the looks of things GOG.com created this modification
themselves, but it could be based on some third party's work.  Either way,
if GOG.com hadn't applied it then the game likely wouldn't work a large
number of modern systems, many which don't have optical drives any more
let alone audio cables connecting the drives to their sound cards.

Steam on the other hand seems to leave this all to the publisher.
Which is a reasonable enough policy, but a lot of of publishers aren't
going to bother.  If GOG.com hadn't taken on it on themselves to do
this work for many of their games then a lot of them simply wouldn't be
available to buy and download from any source.

As your early comment about the prices during GOG.com's Summer sale, I
doubt you'll find a single game they had on sale for a lower price during
Steam's Summer sale.  That is assuming Valve even has one this year.
They seem to be shying away from seasonal sales in preference for daily
and weekly deals.

					Ross Ridge


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