You'd think people would get the hint of what's coming next after "Galaxy"?

Yea I know about this and thought about what the actual impact is.

The Installers only work on XP and later so anything from the XP era should be fine for us.

Windows 98 SE games you are better off buying the original game. GOG.com hacks, mods, patches the games to death and often leaves them broken on old PCs. Tomb Raider II is an example which will not run on a period correct machine. But that games doesn't run well on Windows 8.1 either, so who knows who's to blame.

DOS Games, no big deal as they will continue to use DOSBox with the odd Scumm VM game thrown in.

The main issue I have is the lack of information what they changed to get the game running. Unless you search the forums or ask, they won't tell you if they game uses DOSBox, ScummVM, comes with the installation image or not, uses a wrapper...

GOG.com certainly has changed since the early days with them focusing on MS-DOS games. They quickly figured out that this is a small niche market and expanded and now the site is flooded with indie games, movies, Windows XP games and you need to really dig for the old goodies.

Still, it's another option, another tool in the toolbox of Retro Gaming. Sure it's not perfect and things can get annoying but there will be many releases which are retro friendly such as the many DOSBox based games but also games such as Gabriel Knight or Screamer 2 which come with the full CD image ready to be burnt and played on your Retro Gaming PC.

So I don't worry too much about the negatives and focus on what each distribution platform does well. The biggest complaints seem to come from the Linux Gamers but I believe that Windows XP and later gamers should be fine.

And I thought Phil and I had useless arguments... :B

From what I can tell, all the paranoia and everything and the multi-page discussions have all been sparked by one person who felt the addition of reverse engineering, decompiling and disassembling to the GOG legal docs was a step backwards in their DRM-free stance.

*shakes head* Most of the games GOG offers have had those same legal policies in place since they were brand new. GOG had to get PERMISSION from someone to do those reverse engineering things in order to modify the games to eliminate their copy protection. Heck, they had to get permission to sell all those games in the first place. This isn't a step backwards, it's just GOG covering their bases so they can continue to do what they always have.

And as was pointed out, the archives are getting password protected now to help prevent people from illegally redistributing them with viruses or other malware included. It's not a perfect solution but helps to deter people from casually doing it, thus only the most dedicated hackers would have the capability to do so.

I think what's going on here is someone (or maybe multiple people, I'm not reading the entire thread on GOG) thought that because anti-DRM was birthed from reverse engineering that you can't take an anti-DRM stance without also supporting the illegal activities which helped bring about that notion. To that line of thought, all I have to say is this:

*facepalm*

GOG plan to change TOS forbidding reverse engineering and disassembling even to their own tools and services.

Heck, isn't one of their tools DOSBOX? And isn't DOSBOX open source? The hell?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

GOG plan to change TOS forbidding reverse engineering and disassembling even to their own tools and services.

Heck, isn't one of their tools DOSBOX? And isn't DOSBOX open source? The hell?

Their TOS wouldn't cover DOSBox itself since they didn't make it. It only technically covers the stuff they themselves have made. Each individual game has its own legal docs with similar policies in place anyways. :P

I still feel like people are overreacting to this... though I guess an overreaction is one way to ensure GOG doesn't screw things up in the long run as it lets GOG know just how much of their user base despises DRM in any way, shape or form.

Gemini000 wrote:

I still feel like people are overreacting to this... though I guess an overreaction is one way to ensure GOG doesn't screw things up in the long run as it lets GOG know just how much of their user base despises DRM in any way, shape or form.

It also seems like kind of an irrelevant discussion - it doesn't matter if their TOS says you can or cannot reverse engineer their stuff; it isn't legal to circumvent DRM schemes in the US. So if they're going to DRM their archives, from the law's perspective they're locked. If you're going to decide that you want to crack those archives, you're breaking that law; what's violating a EULA at that point?

obobskivich wrote:

it doesn't matter if their TOS says you can or cannot reverse engineer their stuff; it isn't legal to circumvent DRM schemes in the US. So if they're going to DRM their archives, from the law's perspective they're locked.

Not until they remove "100% DRM FREE" from the front page of their website - that implies that there's no DRM and hence there's nothing to illegally circumvent (outside of breaking the TOS that is).

dexter311 wrote:

Not until they remove "100% DRM FREE" from the front page of their website - that implies that there's no DRM and hence there's nothing to illegally circumvent (outside of breaking the TOS that is).

The law does not see things that way, and ultimately that's all that matters here. If it has any form of copy-protection mechanism it is not legal to circumvent said copy-protection mechanism, at least in the US.

BTW: There's about a bajillion programs that internally use passwords, encryption and other means to keep people from hacking them. Heck, all the cheat codes for my game PixelShips Retro are encoded in a special way so you can't just open the EXE in a hex editor and read them. The logic that "100% DRM Free" somehow also means "100% Free of Internal Encryption/Obfuscation" is ludicrous. :P

so let me get this straight, they offer DRM-Free content and yet people bitch about the installer being password protected or that GoG don't want people re-using/changing their own programs?
Is this a serious discussion or not?
Because from the 2mins I payed attention to it I see that there is nothing to worry about - unless there is something more that I didn't notice?

so, what about the installers for other OS? Right now the OS X stuff comes in a simple disk image that is much easier to open than the Windows installers....

keropi wrote:

so let me get this straight, they offer DRM-Free content and yet people bitch about the installer being password protected or that GoG don't want people re-using/changing their own programs?
Is this a serious discussion or not?
Because from the 2mins I payed attention to it I see that there is nothing to worry about - unless there is something more that I didn't notice?

It's "better" than that. They're complaining that the RAR archive contained internally to the installer is what's password protected, so they can't simply bypass the installer and unpack the files manually. >_>;

It always amazes me how people react when it comes to non-important/silly things and on the other hand they remain silent in things that matter.
Some GoG guy said they have their installers packed this way in order to ensure that their package gets installed exactly the way they want, meaning the "right way" with all settings/files in proper places. Plus you get a bonus that your installer is not easy to modify.

Some people are just drama queens, you still get the files after installation and they are files you can do whatever you want with them. But no, it's not enough: you should be able to change the install program to put some cheesy logo in it and upload it on your site so that everyone know how l33t you are....
🤣 🤣 🤣

One hell of a storm in a tiny teacup.......................

As long as GOG still offers games that can be installed anywhere, anytime without need to contact the mothership (which is what the "100% DRM-FREE" in their front page refers to), I'm fine with this. Too bad some appear to want a "free handout" without any strings attached 😒

I don't know if they might be trying to protect their installer scripts. One of the differences between Inno and NSIS installers is that while unpacking an Inno installer is more of a pain than an NSIS, it does include the installer script in the archive and NSIS does not. Then again, there are other ways to discover what all the installers do that they cannot prevent. Simply tracking what an installer does in a VM will reveal all that it does.

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/on_gnulinux_ … tallers/post470

DosFreak wrote:

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/on_gnulinux_ … tallers/post470

Cool outcome.

DosFreak wrote:

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/on_gnulinux_ … tallers/post470

It's good to finally see an official response - hopefully GOG can come up with something a bit more elegant.

Reddit tends to overblow almost everything that happens anywhere, so I posted it here to get a more grounded discussion going in the context of how Vogons users might be using their releases (like what Phil describes in his videos to install them on older, non-supported OSes). I couldn't care less about how "l33t hackers" or whoever want to use it nefariously by injecting malware or whatever... unfortunately the two use cases are sorta aligned.

philscomputerlab wrote:

DosFreak wrote:

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/on_gnulinux_ … tallers/post470

Cool outcome.

Hey! Something we agree on! XD

dexter311 wrote:

Reddit tends to overblow almost everything that happens anywhere

Basically, it has the combined knowledge and attitude of the internet. :P

...before anyone calls me a thief for saying that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_ … RK5lzfb9w#t=646 - Skip to 10:45