Good Old Games Adds Mac OS X Support

SquarePixel writes "The nostalgic games seller Good Old Games has added Mac OS X support to its platform and a catalog of games to go with it. 'During its much-ballyhooed news-a-thon, GOG drew back the curtain on a new version of its service tailored to Macs, which brings with it 50 games (eight of which you receive free just for signing up) and some rather tempting deals. Speaking of, there's this insane 32-game pay-what-you-want Interplay special leading the charge in celebration of GOG's fourth anniversary.'" Unfortunately, Linux support doesn't seem to be in the cards just yet. On a list of requested site features, Linux support has gotten quite a few votes, but a GOG employee said, "Linux is a great platform, and we love how much passion you guys are showing for it here on our wishlist. ... If we're able to bring GOG.com games to Linux--and we're constantly evaluating ways that we can do this--we want to make sure that we're doing it the GOG.com way: simple, easy, and it 'just works.' I'm not telling you guys to give up hope--we know how much you want this--but what I am saying is that this is harder to support than it might seem initially, and we're not ready to move to support Linux officially just yet."

Comments

Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Cley Faye]

I was under the impression that a lot of the old games are merely dos version packaged with dosbox. I know I use some game I got from GoG under linux, just unpacking it and launching it "by hand".
Am I missing something? I don't see how hard it would be to just package the same thing with a linux version of dosbox...

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[HaZardman27]

I think for a lot of the games that use DOSbox, it works great. However, now that we're over a decade into the 21st century, many games from 1998 - 2004 are considered classics and were not designed for DOS. Fortunately a lot of these games work pretty easily with WINE, but it of course would be nice for native Linux support. For the classic Bioware engine games (Baldur's Gate, Planescape, Icewind Dale...) there is a Linux client for GemRB, which is an open source community rewrite of the engine used for those games. You can purchase and download the GoG versions of those games, and load them up through GemRB (also works on Android!).

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Hatta]

No, you're not missing anything. Anyone who can run Dosbox can run GoG downloads with a small bit effort unpacking their archive.

What would be great is if GoG would distribute some classic Mac games like Marathon or Escape Velocity. Or the 640x480 Mac version of Dark Forces. These games need to be more easily available.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Hatta]

Dosbox is good enough that it can also run Win 3.1 quite well. Apparently it can also run Windows 95, but that's unsupported and I haven't tried it.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[j-beda]

Escape Velocity Nova seems to work on modern Macs:

http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[j-beda]

Escape Velocity Nova seems to work on modern Macs:

http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/

Whoops, "almost modern" might be more accurate - it only lists 10.7 support.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Hatta]

Which is about as relevant as noting that Doom 3 runs on Windows 7.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[MBGMorden]

All well an good, but none of those games are designed for Windows 3.1. If you'll remember - in the Windows 3.1 days virtually no "real" games depended on Windows. Aside from basic things like card games and a few tetris clones and the like, you mostly exited out of Windows to play a game then booted back into Windows afterwards.

It wasn't until Windows 95 came along that you had a significant number of games that actually required WIndows.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[AvitarX]

A list of games that work, and how:
http://www.gog.com/en/mix/great_gog_games_that_works_on_linux

A lot of Wine and open source ports/re implementation of the engines (was it icculus or something that did those?). Not just DOSbox.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Hatta]

That was common, but not universal. The top selling PC game of the 1990s, Myst, was released in 1993 and was Windows only. Even after Windows 95 was released, many Windows games could still be run on 3.x.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[fredprado]

Yes there were a few games designed for Windows 3.1, but they were very few and even most of those got new versions done for win9x, like Myst.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[r1348]

gog.com doesn't sell only old games, despite the name. They launched the OSX version of The Witcher 2 among others.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[AvitarX]

Civilization II was Windows only, could run in 3.1 though.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[tlhIngan]

What would be great is if GoG would distribute some classic Mac games like Marathon or Escape Velocity. Or the 640x480 Mac version of Dark Forces. These games need to be more easily available.

Marathon is available - Bungie released the engine as open source and it became Aleph One. (I don't think bungie.org is the same as bungie.com, just a very popular fansite for all things Bungie, most popular of which is HBO).

It's also available for iOS, done with Bungie's blessing back in the day (the base game is free, in-app purcahses buy cheats and all that stuff). I think Marathon 2 might be out for it as well.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Sir_Sri]

It's the same problem the eve guys had, the existing Linux emulation, translation layers and re-implementations are generally better than anything you can do on your own in a reasonable time frame, especially if, like GoG, you're talking about dozens or hundreds of games, so it's a 'we won't do it ourselves but we're not stopping you from using already working solutions' kinda thing.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Sir_Sri]

That's because it's the same company that made the witcher and GoG. That was their first big new AAA sort of release. And thus far I think their only one.

GoG is about good old games, but why give away 30% on your own title when you sell at least some copies through your own store?

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[r1348]

Well, lately they also have expanded to new games, mostly indies, but with a few AAA ones like Alan Wake.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're not missing anything. Anyone who can run Dosbox can run GoG downloads with a small bit effort unpacking their archive.

What would be great is if GoG would distribute some classic Mac games like Marathon or Escape Velocity. Or the 640x480 Mac version of Dark Forces. These games need to be more easily available.

To get some of the older Mac games up and running, they'll need to recompile them. As they are, they won't run on Intel Macs unless emulated.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Hatta]

Or they'd need an API level simulator of classic Mac OS. But there's no preexisting project for GoG to capitalize upon here.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Tubal-Cain]

There is are TCs (Ambrosia-made, I think) for Override and the classic EV.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[HaZardman27]

Maybe you're already aware, but the Marathon trilogy is now available for the open source Aleph One engine, which is given a thumbs up by Bungie.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[beelsebob]

Uh actually, it was released in 1993 for *Mac* only.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[beelsebob]

Well... an API level simulator and a PPC and/or 68k emulator. There is a preexisting project, but I doubt apple want to give out the source to Classic, and Rosetta unfortunately.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[hairyfeet]

This is true and there is even a list of both those that work in DOSBox on Linux and those that work with WINE so I really don't see what the fuss is about. After all its not like you have to worry about DRM and with the games being...well old, most have been tested and you can always look at the list.

Although frankly this is what dual booting is made for, even the most rabid Linux users I've talked to admit Windows makes a good gaming OS so why not just keep the install that came with the OEM and have a dual boot? Seems like a no brainer to me.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[AvitarX]

I really don't see it as a problem for games, especially older ones where performance is less likely to be an issue.
games aren't going to suffer from being non native in quite the same way as an office app, having pretty much their own interface painted by the game engine.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Hatta]

The PPC and 68K emulators exist already. Sheepshaver and Basilisk. But they require a copy of Mac OS, which would need to be licensed or replaced.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[hairyfeet]

The problem is we really need a DOSBox for Win9X because frankly there are a LOT of games that won't run in Windows OR Linux anymore from that era. For example GOG sells i76 but frankly its hit or miss, more miss, because the game used a hack that used the CPU timer as an event timer in game and it just doesn't know what to make of anything newer than a non HT P4. I've personally tried all the patches, MoSlo, there are simply several in game events that are impossible to get past, the same holds true for MechWarrior 3 (which is arguably one of the best of the series) where enemy tanks will "bounce" hundreds of feet in the air and make it impossible to win, and don't even get me started on all the hacks Sony used on FF VII.

So what we need is an emulator that will give us an emulation of what would be considered close to a perfect Win9X box, let's say a P3 1GHz with 384Mb of RAM and a choice of a Geforce 4 Ti or a Voodoo 2 along with a Soundblaster. This would give everyone the perfect system to run Win9X games on and with our systems being so powerful I don't see why specs that old couldn't be successfully emulated. Otherwise many of those cool games of the Win9X era will be lost forever because I can tell you its getting harder and harder to find decent systems from that era thanks to the cheap caps they used back then. its a damned shame that you can play the latest games, and the games from the DOS era, but that funky 16/32bit hybrid makes it a living hell trying to get many games from that era to run smoothly.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[hairyfeet]

There is a reason for that, Win 3.x used WinG for graphics and it was VERY primitive and crash prone, DirectX came out with Win95 and was head and shoulders better than WinG.

Its just a shame that OpenGL dropped the ball and cared more about CAD compatibility and letting the GPU manufacturers use "shims" than they did about actually competing with DirectX because between 98-02 there was a real shot at taking gaming from DirectX and OpenGL being cross platform was really nice. Now between Windows and the X360 many games are built for DirectX first and OpenGL later if at all, just a damned shame.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[hairyfeet]

Question: As someone who hasn't ever played the Marathon series what is good about it, other than it being made by the guys that made Halo? Looking at the screenshots other than the Blake Stone style bright colors it doesn't look any better than DOOM, so what is the appeal?

Don't get me wrong I love a good shooter even with bad graphics, Redneck Rampage is one of my favs (bought from GOG, check it out if you haven't gotten it already) but that is because it mixes humor, a great rockabilly soundtrack and TONS of cool secrets and crazy weapons to rise above being just another DOOM clone. I mean who can't love shooting a titty gun while drinking beer for health and listening to Mojo Nixon while you blast?

But what sets the Marathon series apart from the bazillion and one DOOM clones we had in that era. Better level design? Weapons? Story? i honestly want to know as I have more games than i have time to play now but I'll always enjoy a well made shooter.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[hairyfeet]

Well to be fair they have also been releasing a lot of the "newer" games in the Ubisoft catalog, such as Far Cry 1 & 2 and Assassins Creed. These are of course certainly not the latest and greatest but certainly newer than the games they usually carry.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[drinkypoo]

Win 3.x used WinG for graphics and it was VERY primitive and crash prone, DirectX came out with Win95 and was head and shoulders better than WinG.

DirectX came out after Win95, and NT already had GL support and NT's software GL renderer would run on Win95.

Its just a shame that OpenGL dropped the ball and cared more about CAD compatibility and letting the GPU manufacturers use "shims" than they did about actually competing with DirectX

You know what's really a shame? That 3dfx made GLIDE instead of starting with MiniGL, which offered Microsoft an opportunity to make their own shitty 3D API instead of being strongly encouraged to go OpenGL, which they certainly could have done. And the rest is history.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[drinkypoo]

What set Marathon apart was the level of functionality. It had more functions with keybindings. Also, it had a story. Today, who cares? Play Halo, close enough. It doesn't have the soul, but nobody wants to read through pages of shit in a FPS any more.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[drinkypoo]

even the most rabid Linux users I've talked to admit Windows makes a good gaming OS so why not just keep the install that came with the OEM and have a dual boot? Seems like a no brainer to me.

I built my PC, you insensitive clod! I have a license for XP and I run an XP VM in vmware player, just upgraded to 5 and d3d support is noticeably better. (Something that was drawing incorrectly is Civ IV is now drawing correctly...) But I don't want to run XP32 on my six-core, 8GB RAM PC with a GT240. I imagine I'll have plenty of problems with early XP32-era games just due to my graphics drivers.

Somehow I got the idea a long time ago that virtualization was going to allow me to run multiple operating systems side by side on the bare metal and I've been trying to get there ever since. Will it take virtualization support in peripherals, do you think?

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is about to drop off the main page so my comment here is probably too late, but what the heck....

> As someone who hasn't ever played the Marathon series what is good about it

In relative terms, the marathon series was to macs what doom/quake was to PCs, ie; the FPS that everyone played, so there's a lot of nostalgia factor. Like other popular games, the series had a very large and healthy community, with lots of 3rd party mods and expansions, so a lot of people messed with it at one point or another. Additionally the marathon 1 engine was slightly more advanced than the doom 1 engine when it first came out.

In absolute terms, the main thing the marathon series is renowned for is the plot and the gameplay. Besides the raw length of spanning three games, the story had all sorts of twists, multiple characters with real character development, shifting allegiances, and TONS of side and background info that gave the player insight into what was going on behind the scenes in the world. It was basically the mass effect of the 90's. Unlike other FPSs of the day where the objective of every level was basically "kill everything", marathon levels had a number of possibilities like rescue/repair/explore/etc. The engine supported nonlinear level progression too, so you could build a "choose your own adventure" scenario with an arbitrary number of branches and loops. Also unlike other FPSs, bungie put a lot of effort into making the weapons have variety and be well balanced. There was no "big nail gun / bigger nail gun" crap- different weapons had different strengths and weaknesses depending on map and player style, so especially net play tended to be a lot more fun. Even the result of a starter pistol vs rocket launcher match was not always guaranteed.

Anyway, bungie open sourced everything ages ago. It was ported to osx/win/lin under the name of "Aleph One" and upgraded to support opengl/shaders and more modern graphics. There's also an ipad port, but they can't mention it's part of the same project or apple will yank it (some stupid rules on apple's part, I forget the details).

The community is largely dead now: the guys left working on the code are insufferable crusty old geeks and the forums are populated almost exclusively by 13yos whose parents won't buy them an xbox or counterstrike. They still put out new releases every once in a while though, I think it finally hit 1.0 last year or something.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgot to mention:

Although I disagree with a number of the things aleph one is doing (like defaulting to the graphics from the xbox port, which suck), it's still more than worth a look. Each scenario is only a couple hundred meg download. In terms of free opensource games, it's one of the best you can get a hold of.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...GLIDE stomped the living shit out of OpenGL and as far as I know there wasn't any "MiniGL" at the time, because even at that point in the game Kronos was dropping the ball when it came to OpenGL by focusing more on CAD than gaming. This is the same problem Linux has, where the kernel devs bend over backwards to rush out a fix for some tiny server issue while the desktop suffers from shittier and shittier performance, its kissing the ass too much of the ones cutting the checks.

But I had both the Voodoo 2 and the Geforce 2 and frankly GLIDE just bitchslapped anything that OpenGL had put out, anything that MSFT put out as well. It wasn't until the Geforce 4 (and Radeon equivalent but I was an Nvidia man at the time) and 3DFX betting the farm on Dreamcast and losing that DirectX really took the top spot and again it was NOT because MSFT did it so much better, it was that Kronos did OpenGL that much worse.

Hell you look at the history of MSFT its one case after another of competition that royally fucked up rather than MSFT truly kicking it with a winning hand, from OpenGL to WordPefect coming out with a bad DOS port in 97 instead of building a native Windows program to Netscape putting out the utterly broken Netscape 4 which made IE 4 look like a slice of heaven by comparison. Time after time it wasn't MSFT doing it better, it was everybody else doing it worse, only now under Ballmer they have a fat moron for a "leader" that doesn't even have the sense to capitalize when others fuck up.

Fuck put ME in charge of MSFT and I'd capitalize the fuck out of it and I'd do a Steve Jobs on the company. there are soooo many areas where the competition is royally fucking up but Ballmer can only dream of being an ersatz Apple rather than focus on the task at hand and do his damned job!

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[hairyfeet]

Drinkypoo get a copy of Win 7 Home, makes a hell of a lot better gaming OS. If you don't care for the UI changes XP X64 is still supported and pretty nice, in fact I avoided XP completely by going from 2K to XP X64 (which is just 2K3 workstation) but for games Win 7 rocks HARD. Better memory management, superfetch and readyboost, DX 11, its just a better choice for gaming.

Although why you'd want to even attempt to run games in a VM is beyond me...is your PC really THAT slow? I have an AMD 1035T with 8Gb of RAM and an HD4850 (great card BTW) and I can boot from Win 7 to Win XP if I need to in less time than it takes for me to waltz over to the fridge and get me a coke. BTW if you insist on using XP 32 look into RAMDisks. My Asrock came with XFast RAMDisk and there are several free and pay RAMDisks out there that will let you use all that RAM in XP 32.

Although frankly now that I've finally switched to Audacity off my old Cubase I really don't miss XP anymore, its just not a great MSFT release like 2K,XP X64, and Win 7 X64. Hell look around for either the OEM or the family pack, both can be found cheap enough and will work great for games. BTW if you want a copy for your VM to laugh at Win 8 X64 is just $40 and it'll have the latest DirectX and support for 192Gb of RAM, and you can always use Start8 to kill that fugly metro shit. Now if you'll excuse me I feel like a little Torchlight 2 in Steam...happy gaming!

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[MaXimillion]

Their official name isn't Good Old Games anymore, it's just GOG.com. They made the change when they started adding brand new DRM-free games like Legend of Grimrock to their catalog.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[TheRaven64]

I don't know where to begin with this...

GLIDE stomped the living shit out of OpenGL and as far as I know there wasn't any "MiniGL" at the time

GLIDE was basically a hacked-up subset of OpenGL. MiniGL is the name given to the subset, without the GLIDE API weirdness - i.e. the subset of OpenGL that the VooDoo could support in hardware. It was used by games like GLQuake.

because even at that point in the game Kronos was dropping the ball when it came to OpenGL by focusing more on CAD than gaming

Kronos didn't exist until about a decade later. Back then there was the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, which was a fairly open process. Vendors proposed extensions in their own namespace (e.g. NV_), once two or more vendors supported the same extension they were moved to the EXT_ namespace and proposed to the ARB. They'd then typically be in the next version of the standard with the ARB_ namespace and in the version after that as a part of the core functionality.

Of course the ARB was focussing on CAD at this time because that was the only existing market for 3D hardware. The PowerVR and 3dfx cards were high-end gaming accelerators and were so expensive that very few people had them even among gamers. They were a tiny niche. More mainstream graphics accelerators, like the Mach64 and the S3 ViRGE were even less capable.

In the first iterations, Direct3D was basically a toy. Very few games used it before DirectX 3, and even those mostly used the software pipeline - I could play most Direct3D games on my father's laptop, which had no 3D acceleration. The Microsoft OpenGL software implementation was a lot slower, and so no one used it for games that needed to run without hardware support. If you were willing to require a 3D card, OpenGL was a better choice, but that limited your market a lot. Most games that went this route wrote their own software pipeline, which typically performed better than the Direct3D HEL, and used OpenGL when there was compatible hardware available (and got better performance there than the Direct3D HAL). Direct3D was a complete bitch to program for until DirectX 5, when it started to look a bit more like OpenGL.

DirectX had one major advantage over OpenGL: it was not just a 3D API. Pretty much any Windows game used DirectX for window and display mode management, input, sound, and often networking and video decoding. Once you're using all of these things, Direct3D seemed like a natural fit to slot into the rest of the code.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[TheRaven64]

It's a bit hit and miss. For example, I just finished Broken Sword 4 (released 2007, bought by me from GOG), on OS X with WINE. I use WineSkin, which lets you create .app wrappers for Windows programs and easily switch between different versions of WINE. With the latest versions of WINE (on a quad 2.2GHz i7) it is slow and laggy, the CPU is at 100%, and periodically the sound gets broken and you get loud noise from the speakers. With the Crossover games engine (also the open source version, also installed by WineSkin) it works fine, but I'd tried five other versions of WINE before I found that one.

That said, I usually buy games when they're discounted at $2.99, so if some don't work yet then I'm happy to wait for WINE to catch up.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[drinkypoo]

Literally everything you said in this comment is wrong. The sibling comment to the one I'm leaving now covers most of it. I want to address this though: "But I had both the Voodoo 2 and the Geforce 2 and frankly GLIDE just bitchslapped anything that OpenGL had put out" Frankly, you are beyond fucking ignorant here. I had both a VooDoo 2 and a Permedia 2 and the V2 was slightly faster than the Permedia 2 had dramatically better image quality. You just really have no idea what you're talking about here, but I owned literally every GPU of the era (V1, V2, PowerVR, Permedia 2...) and the VooDoo 2 did not stand out as a performance powerhouse. Indeed, it stood out only as the only option which would only do full screen or a rectangular overlay.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[drinkypoo]

Drinkypoo get a copy of Win 7 Home

I am not giving Microsoft my money. XP came with a prior machine.

Although why you'd want to even attempt to run games in a VM is beyond me

I don't trust Microsoft to run on my bare metal. I don't want to reboot. I only have 80GB SSD and the rest HDD and it takes too long to boot XP from HDD, and there's no room for it on my SSD.

BTW if you want a copy for your VM to laugh at Win 8 X64 is just $40 and it'll have the latest DirectX

Since I don't run Windows on the bare metal, I am not interested in Windows 8. Windows XP runs fine in a VM.

Now if you'll excuse me I feel like a little Torchlight 2 in Steam

Fuck buying games for Windows, and fuck Steam twice. I still believe in First Sale law.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[AvitarX]

my computer is nearly 5 years old though, I really meant dx7 era games as working and the performance not mattering as much. Though jerking motion probably would happen no matter how much power you throw at it.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[drinkypoo]

Microsoft also had plans for a 3D card (Project Talisman, I worked for Silicon Engineering which was supposed to actually do much of the work under sub-subcontract) and they probably promised big game developers the eventual DirectX-Box, or "Xbox" as it came to be known.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[hairyfeet]

What the fuck is a permedia? Never heard of it, obviously wasn't big because i was building shitloads of gaming rigs at the time and it was all Nvidia geforce 2s and Voodoo boxes, that's all anybody wanted. And GLIDE was a proprietary hacked all too hell bare metal subset of OpenGL but it had about as much to do with openGL proper as Android has to do with a Linux server, IE not much at all. And I apologize if I got the name of the corp in charge of OpenGL wrong but it was a decade and a half ago, the point still stands that from 97-01 OpenGL was equal and often AHEAD of GPU features while MSFT drug up the rear but around late 01-mid 02 (again that was a long fricking time ago and don't have time to look up the exact date) OpenGL fell behind and frankly they never caught back up again.

But don't take my word for it, look up "OpenGL VS DirectX" into any search engine and you'll be ass deep in seriously pissed off developers because OpenGL simply hadn't kept up with the times. The problem lies in the implantation, instead of simply putting out an up to date standard they basically allowed "forks" where Nvidia has some features done this way, AMD has some features done that way, its all nasty shims and crap because they are afraid of pissing off the CAD companies.

Frankly the only hope for OpenGL now is Valve and its steambox and personally? i hope they just take OpenGL away from Kronos, make their own fork and if the CAD guys don't like it fuck them. valve will be able to put one standard and with their pull with the hardware companies i have no doubt they'll listen to valve, after all they've doubled their profits 7 years in a row.

But I'm sorry but while openGL was okay back in the day the bare metal design 3DFX used frankly just smoked it, if you compare say OpenGL Quake with GLIDE Quake running on a native Voodoo? GLIDE simply performed better and looked better. It wasn't until geforce 4 that hardware became powerful enough it didn't really matter about the overhead MSFT had in their DirectX, before that 3DFX ruled the roost, it was just a better setup. Too bad 3DFX bet the entire farm on Dreamcast and then ended up holding their dicks, as who knows? We might have DirectX 11 and GLIDE 12 going head to head today.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[hairyfeet]

Oh good lord step away from the keyboard? do you HONESTLY think you can resell ANY game with an online component anymore? And just FYI but if Steam ever went under, which considering they've doubled their profits every year for 7 years I'm seriously doubting that would happen, but lets say it did...you DO know you can go to Gamecopyworld and just get a crack...yes? No different than you'd have to do with any other modern retail game and at least with Steam I'm paying less than a rental and I'm not ending up with a bunch of hidden shit like Starfuck.

And why in the hell are you even playing PC games if you hate MSFT THAT damned much? just buy yourself a PS3 already. XP is over a decade old, its creaky as fuck and its patches has patches, its just not a good OS. Hell if you hate MSFT that damned much just go to TPB and get a copy of Win 7 Tiny already, at least then you'd have the latest DirectX and its actually smaller than a fully patched XP and lighter to boot.

But tying a boat anchor to your system like that just don't make any damned sense, just fricking buy the console already, most of the new games coming out require DX 10 or better so you'll be SOL if you stick with XP anyway. Hell if you insist on playing on a computer just buy a fricking Mac, although if you think your lousy $40 is gonna affect MSFT in any way, shape, or form I have some magic beans you might be interested in.

There is principles and there is zealotry, try not to let the former become the latter, its not good for you.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[drinkypoo]

What the fuck is a permedia? Never heard of it

And that is why you should just shut the fuck up because you have no fucking idea what you're talking about. Ever heard of 3dlabs? No, of course you haven't.

But I'm sorry but while openGL was okay back in the day the bare metal design 3DFX used frankly just smoked it

That is so much bullshit I have no idea what to even say to you.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[drinkypoo]

Oh good lord step away from the keyboard? do you HONESTLY think you can resell ANY game with an online component anymore?

Yes. I don't buy the ones that I can't. Don't be such a bitch.

And why in the hell are you even playing PC games if you hate MSFT THAT damned much? just buy yourself a PS3 already

I don't trust Microsoft. That's orthogonal to the issue of hate. Your reading comprehension is for shit.

There is principles and there is zealotry, try not to let the former become the latter, its not good for you.

There are people with principles and there are people without. Try not to become the latter, that's how we got EA.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...EA is up for sale, proving the free market works. if enough people don't like something, like say Vista or Win 8, it flops and the company has to listen or go under. But with all the hoops you've set up for yourself frankly you need to just stick with Linux, because you are about as much of a PC gamer as someone with an old Win98 box in the corner. You can count the number of games without a tied online component released in the past few years on 2 hands with fingers left over, not that it matters because you ain't playing shit made this decade with a lame VM adding an assload of translation layers between you and the hardware.

And WTF does "trust" have to do with shit? You think MSFT is gonna sneak through your window and beat your ass? Hell its three damned checkboxes and Windows won't phone home for anything, even updates. Using a network analyzer I can tell you Windows 7 by default calls home for exactly THREE, count 'em three things, it checks for updates, if you don't uncheck the box it'll download artist info like album and year for tunes in WMP, and again if you don't uncheck the box it'll check in once a day so you have the latest TV guide in WMC, that's it, that's all. There is nothing to "trust" as MSFT has separate servers just for those tasks there isn't any way for MSFT to "jump the sandbox" and put stuff in through those inputs, precisely because if MSFT could do it some malware writer could figure out how to use the same vector. Even WGA isn't included by default in Windows Updates, only as an optional download thanks to the Vista fiasco.

So seriously dude just buy a console already although frankly even those are now having DLC and online tied to an account. Because with that many restrictions placed upon yourself its like saying "I watch TV, but only masterpiece theater, and only when its English and only when its hosted by a certain host"...well fuck, you don't really watch TV then do ya? the few games that will work under all those restrictions frankly will work on Linux or even on an iPhone, not really any point for the hoops of insanity.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[drinkypoo]

And WTF does "trust" have to do with shit? You think MSFT is gonna sneak through your window and beat your ass?

Are you really this stupid, or are you just trolling?

So seriously dude just buy a console already although frankly even those are now having DLC and online tied to an account.

I'm just giving up on virtually all new games. I like old games, so this is a working solution for me. If you want to continue to fund the fucking-over of the games market, that's your prerogative, but fuck you.

like saying "I watch TV, but only masterpiece theater, and only when its English and only when its hosted by a certain host"...well fuck, you don't really watch TV then do ya?

Nope, I sure don't. Coincidentally, I only watch downloads and Netflix — actually watching TV is horrible, I don't get any OTA whatsoever, and I refuse to pay a recurring fee for non-a la carte, commercial-laden programming. And I only pay for games when I can be said to be "buying" them, as opposed to renting a login. This is partly because I have a poor internet connection, and partly because I have principles. I would buy some super-cheap internet games, probably. But I won't buy single player offline games with a dial-home component. They are abusive to the player.

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[chrysrobyn]

According to Wikipedia, it was released on September 24 1993 for Mac and PC. It's easy to think it was a Mac exclusive, reading that article, as it was programmed with Hypercard and Quicktime, on Quadras. I remember playing it at a friend's house (he actually had a CD-ROM drive), while I was a senior in high school (1993-1994) and his was a PC-only house.

Those were the days when Mac was easiest to use to write multimedia software, best for Photoshop and barely used by home users.

Bundle

[demonbug]

The pay-what-you-want is actually only for 20 games, and you have to pay more than the average. The 32 games you get for $35. Just pointing that out, still a pretty good deal. Played Castles last night - exactly as I remembered it, incomprehensible. Might have to read the manual to remember how to get my idiots to actually start building; the music transported me directly back to 1991, though. Love that awesome midi sound.

Re:Bundle

[Infernal Device]

Have those games been updated to run on 10.8?

IIR, Apple got rid of some legacy graphics support that those games needed to run (256-color mode, Rosetta support). I'd hate to blow $32 and have a bunch of games that were unplayable and eating up drive space.

Re:Bundle

[Hatta]

Love that awesome midi sound.

Does GoG configure Dosbox with Timidity, FluidSynth, or Munt? For good Midi sound on dosbox you either need a good software synthesizer like the above, or a real hardware midi synth plugged into your computer.

Dosbox does emulate the OPL3 for Adlib/soundblaster compatible FM synth, which is still pretty sweet. IMO, the FM synth in Dosbox is better than some period OPL3 clones, but not as good as a real Yamaha OPL3.

Re:Bundle

[ram.loss]

As usual, the summary is a bit misleading. The Mac support includes only 50 games none of which are part of the interplay "pay what you want" offering. The two announcements were conflated into one. The real Mac promo is here:
Mac promo

Re:Bundle

[ram.loss]

Ooops, I've found the real announcement too:

GOG.com goes Mac

Re:Bundle

[MysteriousPreacher]

Good question. If it works, I'm going to be buying Syndicate. Absolute classic game!

Re:Bundle

[Halo1]

Have those games been updated to run on 10.8?

In general, the games never ran and never will run directly under any version of Mac OS X (or even "classic" Mac OS), and hence do not have to be updated. The currently released games fall into four categories:

• They are DOS/Windows games, but are supported by ScummVM. The GOG installer will install ScummVM to run them. Before you yell "those are not native Mac ports!", keep in mind that those games were originally basically a lot of sound, graphics and a script, bundled with a DOS-based script interpreter. ScummVM is a modern replacement for those script interpreters (it's also used on the Windows for most of those games).
• They are other DOS games. These are packaged so they run under DOSBox. These are obviously not native Mac ports either, but they're handled exactly the same by GOG on Windows. It's the same principle as using a Super Nintendo emulator to run old SNES games.
• They are Windows games. I'm only aware of The Witcher and King's Bounty being in this situation. The Witcher is based on Wine, I don't know about King's Bounty but I guess it's the same (but it may also be a native Mac port). In this case it's mostly a matter of not being able to play the games at all, or playing them under Wine. Your call.
• They are dual Mac/Windows releases. I'm only aware of The Witcher 2 being in this situation.

That said: ScummVM, DOSBox and Wine all work under 10.8. Since they are emulation layers to some extent, chances are actually higher that they will keep working with future Mac OS X releases (or at least can be fairly easily updated) than with so-called native ports. At least every boxed Mac game I ever bought is gathering dust (from Lemmings for System 7 to Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever for Mac OS X/PowerPC) (*) (**), while I can still play every single DOS/Windows game I ever bought thanks to DOSBox and Wine.

Since The Witcher 2 was only just released, I think it's a good bet that it will run under 10.8. Also, like the other person said, the Interplay promo does not include any of the Mac-ified games. All DOSBox-based ones are trivial to get running though, and the Windows ones generally aren't that hard either (I've been buying and playing gog.com games on my Mac for several years now).

(*) ok, one exception: Space Quest IV for Mac, which is supported by ScummVM...
(**) I know about Sheepshaver, but it wasn't been very stable when I tried it

Re:Bundle

[TheRaven64]

The old games run in ScummVM or DOSBox, both of which use something newer (e.g. OpenGL) for the final pixels-on-the-screen bit of the emulation, so they don't depend on 256 colour modes. The main difference from the Windows version is that they now have Mac installers. I found it slightly irritating that I needed to use WINE to install a game that I was going to run with a native DOSBox or ScummVM, and this has now been fixed. A lot of the newer games also work with WINE, but they're probably not going to get Mac installers until they've been tested.

Re:Bundle

[TheRaven64]

It's worth tweaking the DOSBox configuration for any GOG game. They pick pretty conservative settings. I noticed some games were looking a bit worse than I'd expect and found that they're using the fastest scaling algorithm for point-and-click games. Switching to hq3x made the output a lot nicer.

Re:Bundle

[smash]

it works

Re:Bundle

[MysteriousPreacher]

Cheers for that.

Not actually "pay what you want" for all 32

[Red_Chaos1]

If you want all 32 games you'll have to pay $34.99. Not bad at all, but not "pay what you want." Also seems to me that there were a lot more games from back in the day with the Interplay name on them, not just these 32.

Re:Not actually "pay what you want" for all 32

[Anonymous Coward]

here's a starting point...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Interplay_games

Re:Not actually "pay what you want" for all 32

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worth nothing that "pay what you want" doesn't include amounts above $2500.01 either.

Re:Not actually "pay what you want" for all 32

[petermgreen]

No pay what you want is only 8 games.
More than the average (currently 13.72) is 20 games
and $34.99 is the full bundle.

Re:Not actually "pay what you want" for all 32

[VGPowerlord]

Also seems to me that there were a lot more games from back in the day with the Interplay name on them, not just these 32.

Interplay was also a publisher. Among other things, they published Blizzard's earlier games, such as The Lost Vikings and The Lost Vikings 2: Norse by Norsewest.

The latter was on the Interplay 15th Anniversary collection in the 90s, but Interplay's then-new owners sold their publisher rights in 2001ish.

There were also the various Star Trek games, whose license likely ended years ago.

Re:Not actually "pay what you want" for all 32

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it would be "pay what you want above 34.99" for all the 32 games...
Still a pretty fair deal IMO, especially considering the starting and beat the average packages.

Re:Not actually "pay what you want" for all 32

[Anonymous Coward]

They may not have licenses for all their old games.
E.g., their right to sell the Fallout games ends at the end of 2013, so they'll want to milk it while they can.

As far as I can tell, Interplay is mostly a afterimage of old IP these days - the developers have moved on to other studios.
Both Obsidian and inXile emphasized their Interplay heritage in their recent Kickstarters.

Re:Not actually "pay what you want" for all 32

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want all 32 games you'll have to pay $34.99. Not bad at all, but not "pay what you want." Also seems to me that there were a lot more games from back in the day with the Interplay name on them, not just these 32.

The most obvious omission being The Lost Vikings!

Allahu Al Akhbar!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm already downloading Mac version of The Witcher: EE.

Yeehaw!

Work on the dropping of Classic/PPC support

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Lion onwards OSX PPC support has been dropped as well as the old OS9 and below games. Plenty of games and apps have been lost due to poor emulation. As for Linux don't support Ubuntu because of their Amazon betrayal.

Re:Work on the dropping of Classic/PPC support

[tepples]

As for Linux don't support Ubuntu because of their Amazon betrayal.

Which physical goods shopping site should Canonical have chosen instead of Amazon?

No such thing as a Linux OS

[Anonymous Coward]

What people in the Linux community tend to forget is there is no such thing as the Linux operating system. There are dozens of operating systems based upon Linux, but there isn't any one Linux platform to target. If GOG rolls out support for, say, Ubuntu, they will have hundreds of Arch users still nagging them for support. If they support Red Hat, they leave Debian out in the cold. It's virtually impossible to support all Linux desktop distributions because there's no lowest common denominator and the various projects are in constant flux.

Re:No such thing as a Linux OS

[jedidiah]

No.

There is indeed a single Linux.

There's just one X. One kernel. One SDL. Beyond that you might have a couple choices for things like sound or the desktop API.

It's not quite as bad as or "fragmented" as some people like to make out.

  libvorbis is libvorbis regardless of what distro you're running.

Packaging is different but that's something you can let individuals handle. Allow Debian or Redhat users the lattitude and they will make their own packages.

Linux is no more in flux than any other desktop PC that can have any combination of various versions of various libraries.

Re:No such thing as a Linux OS

[TheRealMindChild]

What version of libc? What shell? Why do I need X to install a package... I'm a linux user! Is X running in a framebuffer or hardware accelerated? Do we only have MESA installed?

Also, there is NOT only one kernel. Depending on what you are running, it may even be as drastic as 2.4.* vs 2.6.*.

Re:No such thing as a Linux OS

[MBGMorden]

Actually the kernel pretty much IS the OS. A lot of distributions throw their own software packages atop that OS but they're all Linux. Same binary format and you can pretty much expect that they're all running an x.org server for graphics.

Also - many programs already have binary Linux distributions that work on just about any target platform. You just use statically compiled libraries and for the most part you're good.

Even then, if you want something that even depends on some things within a distribution you can target Red Hat and Debian and cover 90% of the market. Ubuntu, Mint, and Debian all basically fall under the same structure and Redhat, Fedora, and CentOS all fall under the same structure. Outside of those main few the userbase drops considerably and for many on systems like Arch or Gentoo they're the types that will figure out how to make it work regardless.

Re:No such thing as a Linux OS

[adri]

Dude. Please go and speak to a game developer about the screwed up graphics driver nightmare under windows.

Then realise that the same exists on Linux.

A lot of effort goes into the Windows + (all the different versions of graphics drivers out there) nightmare. Linux would at _least_ be that kind of screwed up to maintain. That's a lot of manpower for no specific revenue targets. No PHB is going to agree to that.

Now if Linux had a sane, stable graphics environment that provided the same experience on all platforms.. everything would be sweet. But PCs don't let you get away with that.

Re:No such thing as a Linux OS

[VGPowerlord]

Also, there is NOT only one kernel. Depending on what you are running, it may even be as drastic as 2.4.* vs 2.6.*.

You mean 2.6.x.y vs 3.6.z right? :P I mean, that only spans the last 15 months...

Re:No such thing as a Linux OS

[Anonymous Coward]

You might as well claim there's only one Windows since Windows 95 (R2) and Windows 8 both have the same Internet Explorer. #fail

Does It Include Breakout?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it include Breakout? Super Breakout?

Support System Shock II...

[benjfowler]

... and you've got my money. Best game ever.

Re:Support System Shock II...

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at you, pathetic creature of meat and bones, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors.

Re:Support System Shock II...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah.

Re:Support System Shock II...

[antdude]

Have you seen http://sshock2.com/ ? ;)

Re:Support System Shock II...

[antdude]

SHODAN rocks!!

Re:This is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Small company supports obscure operating system.

Small company starts selling old mass-market Mac games which you couldn't otherwise buy any more.

GoG don't write their own games, they're a DRM-free retailer selling other companies' games, mostly old ones that have been out of print for years but a few newer ones too.

Already playing for years on the Mac via DOSBox

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of these games I've already been playing for years on the Mac via DOSBox. Only I'm running OSX 10.4 or 10.5 and GOG requires 10.6.8 or later. What are we paying for again?

Re:Already playing for years on the Mac via DOSBox

[MysteriousPreacher]

Presumably these would be licensed copies of the games. That and the games packaged in a way that doesn't require torrenting and then fiddly set-up.

Re:Already playing for years on the Mac via DOSBox

[TheRaven64]

Two things:

First, when you buy the game you get both the Windows and Mac versions, so if you are using an old and unsupported version of OS X then you can still use the Windows installer under WINE and then play the games under DOSBox or ScummVM.

Second, you're paying for the Mac installer, that comes with DOSBox or ScummVM preconfigured. Several of the games I've already bought from GOG now have Mac versions, and if I want to play them again then I can just grab the Mac version next time, rather than having to run the installer in WINE and then set up DOSBox of ScummVM to point to that install. So, I'm paying nothing more, but getting a lot more convenience. Sounds like a win to me...

Maybe I'm confused

[Coffeesloth]

Maybe I'm confused but isn't OS X simply Apple's version of Linux? I realize this is a simplistic view but I don't see why they wouldn't be able to create a package for Linux.

Re:Maybe I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's Apple's version of BSD.

Re:Maybe I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainly a variant of BSD, Cocoa, & no X11 are some of the hurdles in Mac -> Linux porting

Re:Maybe I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's BSD underneath, but these games are all compiled with Xcode, so it's using the native OS X libraries and API's for everything. While a large amount the architecture of the kernel and BSD subsystem is easily emulated or even mapped to compatible API's under Linux, the native labries would need to be emulated in a similar way to WINE.

Re:Maybe I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not confused. You're stupid.

Re:Maybe I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

The OS X kernel is a hybrid of the Mach and BSD kernels.

Marathon

[lister king of smeg]

If I remember correctly the game engine for the marathon series has already been open sourced and ported to Linux, you can grab the sources code (and precompiled binaries for OSX and Windows) from bungi's websites and the game files are a free download from there along with numerous mods.Sso I'm not sure how much more easily available they could be as for the others I don't know.

Re:This is news?

[Halo1]

Small company starts selling old mass-market Mac games which you couldn't otherwise buy any more.

No, they start selling old mass-market DOS games now also packages with DOSBox for Mac, rather than only with DOSBox for Windows (or with ScummVM for Mac, or with Wine, or in very few cases a native Mac port -- but the last category aren't really old games until now).

Security vulnerability in static libs

[tepples]

You just use statically compiled libraries and for the most part you're good.

Until someone discovers a security vulnerability in zlib, libpng, libjpeg, or one of the other statically linked libraries.

Re:Security vulnerability in static libs

[MBGMorden]

Which would only affect people running that particular application while it was running. At that point it becomes a security issue with the game - not the library. They recompile and issue it along with their standard game patches.

Re:This is news?

[jo_ham]

Small company supports obscure operating system.

Stop the presses!

The announced Mac OS X support, not Linux support.

Oh, I see what you were trying to do there.

Re:This is news?

[petermgreen]

Small company starts selling old mass-market Mac games which you couldn't otherwise buy any more.

Sadly no.

Old mac games that haven't been ported aren't going to be of any use to owners of modern macs without an emulation soloution. Afaict there are no free clones of classic macos (while there is a free clone of dos) so selling old mac games with an emulation soloution would require apple's coperation.

Afaict what has actually happened here in most cases* is that GoG has started bundling old dos games with a mac version of dosbox and a mac installer as well as bundling them with a windows version of dosbox and a windows installer.

GoG don't write their own games, they're a DRM-free retailer selling other companies' games, mostly old ones that have been out of print for years but a few newer ones too.

GoG is actually a subsidary of a game developer but the vast majority of the games they sell are indeed third party.

*I think a few games do have native mac ports but they are by far the exception.

I love GOG!

[Goat of Death]

Every bit of feedback I've ever sent them has gotten implemented. When first using the GOG downloader I sent them feedback that it's annoying I had to queue individual bonus content pieces one at a time. Few months later they updated and now you can add all bonus content for a game in one click. Later I gave the feedback that for any Dosbox based games they should have Mac versions. Lo and behold, today my purchase of Syndicate I can now download for Mac as well.

GOG rules!

They put man-years of effort into Apple OS

[Anonymous Coward]

but they couldn't do it for Linux. Fuck you, GOG.

Re:This is news?

[narcc]

Yeah, if you combine the market share of the last three major versions you get something like the market share of Windows Vista. That's not obscure at all.

480GB torrent says it all

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for all the fish

Neeraj is dishonest.

[Anonymous Coward]

Neeraj ripped me of Rs 10,000.

Re:Steam

[farble1670]

Anything they have that I'm even remotely interested in can be brought up in DosBox or WINE.

sure, if you have those floppies hanging around from 1992. if you bought them in the first place.

Used to be a gamer. . .

[kimvette]

GOG drew back the curtain on a new version of its service tailored to Macs, which brings with it 50 games (eight of which you receive free just for signing up) and some rather tempting deals.

. . . but unfortunately 49 of those games are variations of Tetris. The 50th one is that cool puzzle game with the Apple logo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk8hxjpnUiw

Re:Used to be a gamer. . .

[sponse]

but you toke an arrow in the knee ? Sorry, I still can help my self.

Re:Steam

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether anyone did or not is inconsequential. They want to sell a product in an environment where that product is freely available to anyone willing to put forth the effort. In that environment, they have bent over backward to court only a subset of their potential customers, snubbing others. It's bad business; it's favoritism, plain and simple... and they can fsck off.

Re:Steam

[farble1670]

you have essentially said that they need to produce a product that can compete with free, because if it's cheaper / easier to steal it, you'll do that. it's pretty hard for a company to compete with free, so now you understand why they aren't producing a linux version.

Re:Steam

[Anonymous Coward]

The rest of the gaming industry, not to mention the music and movie industries, don't seem to be having too much trouble making money in the very same market. And, for the record, Windows is far and above the platform of preference for most game pirates -- after all, Windows is what most games are designed to run on.

Re:This is news?

[drinkypoo]

Afaict there are no free clones of classic macos (while there is a free clone of dos) so selling old mac games with an emulation soloution would require apple's coperation.

Apple offers downloads of System 7, that's not the problem. The problem is that the emulator requires a ROM image, which Apple does not offer for download.

Re:Steam

[farble1670]

so your rational is they since they are making money, it's okay for you to steal it? or what the heck are you even saying?

i didn't say anything about industries making or not making money in the face of piracy. i said linux users like you aren't helping your cause, when you clearly state your willingness to steal the software. if i'm a game company, i'm thinking,

1. if i don't price it how he wants, he's going to steal it
2. if i don't package how he wants, he's going to steal it
3. if i don't provide equal support for linux, he's going to steal it

why would i support linux again? anything you have an interest in you'd have already pirated right? you clearly have no qualms about it.

Windows is far and above the platform of preference for most game pirates -- after all, Windows is what most games are designed to run on.

it might have something to do with the fact that there's practically no games worth pirating on linux.

Re:This is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a retard.

Re:This is news?

[TheRaven64]

Actually, it does. There is a firmware update available that contains a self-extracting installer that contains the ROM. Unfortunately, there's a slightly bootstrapping problem, because it's a Classic m86K binary, so you need to have working emulation before you can get the ROM.

Re:This is news?

[drinkypoo]

Unfortunately, there's a slightly bootstrapping problem, because it's a Classic m86K binary, so you need to have working emulation before you can get the ROM.

I wonder if you could address this issue legally by having a single mac somewhere that does the download and extraction... which file do I download to get a buried ROM image? I actually have a classic mac here, though it might be too old to run it. :)

When a product (or its company) goes EOL

[tepples]

They recompile and issue it along with their standard game patches.

Provided that the product's publisher is still in business and has not yet EOL'd the product.

Re:This is news?

[TheRaven64]

I don't remember exactly where, but the Basilisk II site linked to it in the forums along with instructions for extraction. It's pretty easy once you've got a m68K Mac (or a PPC Mac with the emulator). Just run the installer and it self-extracts and says 'sorry, this is the wrong kind of Mac' but leaves the ROM image where it did the extraction.