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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[beelsebob]

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

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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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.

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

[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

[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

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

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

[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.*.

Support System Shock II...

[benjfowler]

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

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: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?

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.