I am amazed anything works with all those sound cards in there 😂

There is an online spreadsheet with instructions for getting many GOG games working on win98.

Digital DOS games (GOG, Steam...) Retro PC Compatibility Sheet: We need your input!

DosFreak wrote on 2020-04-25, 12:17:

Digital DOS games (GOG, Steam...) Retro PC Compatibility Sheet: We need your input!

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😉

Wow! Very impressive machine! I am also curious about hardware conflicts between your soundcards.
But to your question: Are you able to mount the CD ISOs in some program like Daemon Tools?
It shout mount many ISO formats and subformats and to give you some information about the ISO.
Don't forget that there exists more filesystems used on CDs. In DOS/Win98 is usable Joliet and ISO-9660 BUT other popular format called UDF is usualy not supported. (only with special driver)

DarkVamp1976 wrote on 2020-04-25, 11:30:

I know that GOG is holding 99% of the Single CD games on a file called game.gog which is a normal iso but only renamed.

I tried to rename the file and burn to CDR but only a very few are readable with DOS. Most are not. What do I wrong?

Those gog files are (mostly) not ISOs, and usually are not complete ISOs from the game. Most games fall in two categories:
- The ISO is a stub, with only the necessary data to bypass protection checks or contains only the data that is not installed on HDD (i.e.: Crusader: No regret installed the program but not the video files).
- The ISO is a stub, because the game uses CD audio and the audio tracks start at track 2 (i.e.: Heroes of Might and Magic 2).

So you're (probably) not doing anything wrong... the ISO didn't contains the data you expected. I'd recommend you to mount and inspect those ISO files before burning anything.

I'm honestly a bit disappointed with GOG in that it seems most of the DOS CD games they sell don't come with an actual working ISO. Most of the point and click adventure games use SCUMMVM, but even for games that use DOSBOX, I've found myself having to resort to archive.org to find actual ISOs for many of the games I've bought on GOG, just so that I could install them in PCEM, for instance. A lot of the games that have CD audio tracks are stubs like Zup mentioned above, where the actual tracks are compressed OGG files in a separate folder; I know you can recreate the ISO by converting the tracks to WAV and burning using the CUE file, but then you end up with worse audio quality than the original CD due to lossy compression to OGG format.

I know GOG's market is not necessarily people that want to play these games on actual period hardware, but it would be nice if they offered the original game ISO as an extra, for instance. It would be a great opportunity to not only provide these games in a format playable on modern hardware (via SCUMMVM and DOSBOX), but also to preserve these games in the format they were originally released (ISO, or even images of the original install diskettes!).

I have, on several occasions, asked GOG to offer original game media (disks, cds, etc.) for games they sell as extra downloads. Nothing came of it. Feel free to knock on that door, though.

This is why I no longer buy GOG games. I really appreciate the hard work they put into getting old games to work on modern systems but games that worked 5 years ago often don't work properly now on Windows 10 and if you're thinking of running them on original hardware, you quickly discover GOG gutted a ton of drivers that they figured modern systems wouldn't need but which stop it from running on original hardware.

but games that worked 5 years ago often don't work properly now on Windows 10

So you need retro PC for GOG releases, huehuehue.

I bought some games on GOG a longer time ago...now years later I downloaded and tried to install them....tried!
Nothing...simply nothing! works. The installers don't launch...the installer has no option is blank...pressing enter helps (sometimes)...lot's of additions stuff is installed and mostly only errors are posted...and the games...non works on Win2K with DX9 card on AthlonXP...none!

If there is no option die download these games as they were released but only cracked for nocd....I will buy the games on CD and search for cracks...no so handy...but this gog stuff is pain in the ass.

Crazy! Gog sell's old games that do not run on old-pc's they were released for and also they don't work on new PC's...so where is the sweet-spot here....CRAP!

As I said, for me as a retro-gamer I want to download old games with no copy-protection to play they on old machines!
Don't see a big market to play old games on really new machines...

The real retro-gamer plays retro-games on retro-pc's !

dr.zeissler wrote on 2022-11-19, 16:39:

Crazy! Gog sell's old games that do not run on old-pc's they were released for and also they don't work on new PC's...so where is the sweet-spot here....CRAP!

My experience with GOG releases has been as follows. DOS era games usually ship with DOSBox and can be installed on a modern PC without much hassle. After that, it's easy to copy over the folder containing the game to a real DOS machine and run it from there. Preferably, delete any files from the game folder which don't conform to the 8+3 naming convention beforehand, as they aren't needed on a real DOS system.

Games from the WinXP era generally work fine, and their installers can be used on a real WinXP system. However, in some rare instances, GOG includes modified versions of DirectX DLL files which make it easier for a game to work on newer (post-XP) operating systems, but may cause issues on a real DX9 compatible WinXP machine. Deleting these DLL files usually solves the issue.

For Win9x era games, the situation is not so great. GOG offline installers don't run under Win9x, so you need to use a different OS to perform the installation and then copy the game folder over to your actual Win9x system. However, this doesn't always work since GOG often integrates Glide wrappers and fan-made patches into their releases which cause problems when you want to use the game on real, period correct hardware. This varies on a case by case basis.

In conclusion, I too wish that GOG would offer unaltered images of older games (in addition to their current offline installers) but I gather that this might not be feasible from a server maintenance standpoint. But again, this mostly seems to be an issue for Win9x era games, while DOS and WinXP titles can (usually) be made to run on real hardware with minimal effort.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-11-19, 17:16:

Games from the WinXP era generally work fine, and their installers can be used on a real WinXP system. However, in some rare instances, GOG includes modified versions of DirectX DLL files which make it easier for a game to work on newer (post-XP) operating systems, but may cause issues on a real DX9 compatible WinXP machine. Deleting these DLL files usually solves the issue.

100% - I discovered this through trial and error/desperation and was pleasantly surprised that deleting the .dll allowed me to get GOG Jade Empire to install and play nice on my XP Rig.

The Problem is, I do not have a XP-machine....the newest I have is a Win2K machine and on that nothing I bought works.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2022-11-21, 06:08:

The Problem is, I do not have a XP-machine....the newest I have is a Win2K machine and on that nothing I bought works.

It's been a while since I last checked, but I'm reasonably sure that I could use GOG's offline installers on my Win2K + SP4 machine.

IIRC, the picture ads which showcase other games during the installation didn't work, but the actual installer did, and I was able to complete the process. Unless they changed something recently, this should still be the case.

I see nothing, the installer let's me check one field and that was it. If I press enter without seeing the cursor it sometimes starts the install-process.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2022-11-21, 12:33:

I see nothing, the installer let's me check one field and that was it. If I press enter without seeing the cursor it sometimes starts the install-process.

I just freshly downloaded the GOG offline installer for Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and successfully installed it on my Windows 2000 machine. No KernelEx or any other stuff like that, just a stock Win2k Professional + SP4 installation. Here's what I get at the start of the process:

And here's what happens after the installer finishes up:

Like I mentioned before, there were no images showing ads for other games during the install process, but otherwise, it worked ok. The game itself runs fine on Win2k. I was also able to copy it over to my Win98 system and it ran fine there as well.

The installers should also be able to be unpacked as well assuming they haven't changed the format.

infiniteclouds wrote on 2022-11-20, 18:47:

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-11-19, 17:16:

Games from the WinXP era generally work fine, and their installers can be used on a real WinXP system. However, in some rare instances, GOG includes modified versions of DirectX DLL files which make it easier for a game to work on newer (post-XP) operating systems, but may cause issues on a real DX9 compatible WinXP machine. Deleting these DLL files usually solves the issue.

100% - I discovered this through trial and error/desperation and was pleasantly surprised that deleting the .dll allowed me to get GOG Jade Empire to install and play nice on my XP Rig.

Had a similar experience playing Empire Earth on my retro lan with a buddy last weekend. On one machine it outright crashed, on the other it would run but no textures would display. Luckily on his machine, the error specifically mentioned a directx dll that was sitting in the local directory. I figured outright removing it should fix the problem, but my buddy checked it's metadata and it was specifically noted as being a DX wrapper.