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 ?

[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 ?

[beelsebob]

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

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.

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.

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.

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: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?