So far I have managed to get all GOG.com DOSBox games to run on a real retro PC.

The methods range from easy to quite involving depending on the game.

Sierra games mostly miss the installer but you can just edit RESOURCE.CFG

I used to do tweakguide video tutorials for GOG.com games but the interest was minimal so I stopped doing that.

For the Sierra series on GOG, many of them are based on the VU 2006 release, which stripped not only the installer files, but also many of the driver files. These driver files are not 100% mix and match, so pulling them from other complete Sierra games is hit or miss. My patches for the 2006 collections corrects all of the issues with those collection, but the GOG releases are laid out differently enough that the patchers probably fail. The steam releases are nearly identical to the 2006 collections that they do apparently work with the Steam release.

Somewhere on this board I posted a patch designed specifically for the GOG KQ releases if you want to search.

From what I can tell, GOG doesn't care one bit whether these video games are preserved properly or not. They're out for the people who either never learned or completely forgot what it was like to get anything running under legacy systems, hence the utterly worthless guesswork on settings and botched installations that plague their downloads.

If it were within my possibilities, I'd start a ftp service for 1:1 CloneCD/ImageDIsk binary copies of the original titles. That would be something.

Just upload to Internet Archive. They seem to have a free pass. That way they cover the legal, storage and bandwidth costs.

I think something like that, realistically, if it were possible at all (considering the legal shortcomings) would be best carried out by the contributions of as many people interested in the proper preservation of legacy software (it would require at least 2 copies of the same CD/Diskette from different sources and a protocol for corroboration) through Freenet. That would ensure continuous, speedy, anonymous downloads for an indefinite amount of time.

Well we don't really support talking about things like that here. heh.

Internet Archive we allow talk of since legally they can get away with it. Anything else here is not allowed.

Forgive unto me I beg thee, such a trespass, for it seemeth I have not expounded these mine thoughts in sufficient artifice.

You see, what actually meant was this: if I were in GOG's shoes, that is, if it were a 100% legal, I'd much rather provide these perfect copies of the originals, but I'm not, so it's not going to happen. I'm against piracy in all and any of it's forms, save for the making of backups nobody but the owner should be allowed to lay hands on.

The suggestion of Freenet comes from the necessity, as I see it, to ditch centralized hosting and centralized internet in a general sense.

The DOS releases aren't that bad to be honest. Most of the time the sound can be configured by using a command line parameter or editing a config file.

The use of ScummVM for many games makes playing them on original DOS hardware often impossible. 7th guest for example or Sam and Max release.

But much worse are the releases of early Windows games. They are hacked, cracked, patched and modified quite substantially. Many can get going by manually extracting the installer archive and running it of a folder, but not all games work like that. Other games have features stripped, for example the GOG version of Splinter Cell doesn't support EAX, even on a XP machine. The steam version does. The GOG version does include the extra 3 bonus levels however.

Having to buy games several times to get all versions (Space Quest on GOG and Steam) is also quite annoying or not getting all media versions such as CD-ROM and Floppy versions (Space Quest 4 or Alone in the Dark) is also annoying.

It boils down to the paying customer getting a lesser product / fewer options / restrictions compared to just pirating it. Which is a real shame and many games on GOG are not even that cheap. I try to buy them only during sales if I can.

I think the best solution would be to provide an alternate download with an unaltered BIN/Cue image. They have patched some games so extensively that they work far better than they ever had. Notable examples are Silver (which was pulled off the catalogue unfortunately), Betrayal in Antara (anyone else remember the Chapter 9 crash?), Lords of Magic etc...

On what basis do they actually decide which games should have complete ISOs and which don't? Many games indeed come with an image ready to be burned and installed on an old PC. Unfortunately, that information is not part of the game's page.
Usually, they call the .cue file .dat, .ins or .inst and the .bin file .gog for some reason. If it is just an ISO image, the .cue file is absent.

Maybe we should do a list. I'll start with those I have. Not included in this list are Windows games, since the Gog-Installer is no issue on those. Also not included are floppy games, because the only ones I have are those Sierra games, but as you probably know, Sierra stripped them themselves and delivered them on CD that way. The only way to buy them in complete condition is probably on old floppies.

Games with installable CD image:
Little Big Adventure (CD audio is uncompressed)
Gabriel Knight 1
Normality Inc. (be aware of different voice acting, see their forum for details)
Shadow Warrior (complete with the build editor and univbe, CD audio is Ogg Vorbis)
Worms United

Games with stripped or no CD image:
Duke Nukem Atomic Edition (you can just copy the files and run setup.exe, I guess)
Dungeon Keeper (setup files missing)
One Unit Whole Blood (you can copy the files and run setup.exe. There is also CD audio)
Redneck Rampage Collection (you can just copy the files and run setup.exe. There are CD-images with an empty data track and uncompressed CD audio)

Just a quick comment to the OP, while voting on GOG for this I noticed that there's already a request for the missing setup files with 500+ votes. Maybe we'll have better results if we redirect our attention to that one?

I wouldn't get hopes up. This is the same company that didn't fix their Saints Row 2 port.