AppleSauce wrote on 2024-02-06, 01:49:
I had a feeling this might be a problem one day , honestly at this point gog should start offering the original floppy disk images and bin / cue files , I think some games offer it but I'm guessing not all of them.
Quite a few games that are available on GOG have some sort of legacy option, whether as a separate download or with a sub-folder in the main installer for either backwards-compatible EXE files or having a full install (effectively being installed twice) - examples of the former being Blitzkrieg 1 and 2, Empire of the Fading Suns (who I convinced the current rights holders to add just before they released the 1.5 update) and Seven Kingdoms 2. Examples of the latter being Thief 1 and 2, Majesty Gold HD and Blade of Darkness. Night Dive Studios are on my shitlist for removing the original version of Shadow Man from GOG and never offering it as an optional download - the GOG release of the original version works perfectly fine on Win98.
On the flip side, several games use a WINMM injection and provide OGG soundtracks instead of uncompressed WAV - you could use something like _INMM to get it working on Win98, but the fundamental problem of having compressed audio tracks remains. This is an instance where bin/cue files are very much preferred.
Also some releases are butchered to help with running the game on modern systems which makes it harder to run on period correct hardware or you miss certain options like mt32 support , I've read about some people complaining about that.
Ultimately I get that GOG mainly caters to running games on new systems but it also makes it difficult for us retro peeps, though I guess backwards compatibility gets more difficult the further hardware advances and sacrifices have to be made and there's a whole philosophical song and dance you can get into about that.
I worked on a project back in 2021/22 documenting games from my GOG library that are compatible with Win98, I never finished it (especially with cross-referencing which games from the mid-00s were originally Win98-compat) but I'll throw it here since I might as well not let it bitrot, plus any motivation to work on it would be good:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TrTaM … 0RrrZ-4HvcBSfM/
The most important thing to note is that several games have DDRAW.DLL injections along with nGlide installs, D3D8.DLL and other DLL files - replacing those with Win98-compatible equivalents will get them up and running. A couple of games I was able to only get to work once (1nsane and Mobile Forces) and could never get them working properly again, which is odd. Probably requires some arcane combination of things installed. You finally have instances of various renderers being stripped from releases, such as everything that isn't Glide from POD Gold and software renderers from Uprising 1 and 2, Pandemonium 1 and 2 and Requiem: Avenging Angel.
On the DOS side of games, you have issues like non-VGA modes being stripped out (Battle Isle, Crystals of Arborea, Silent Service 2, Wing Commander 1, Hyperspeed being at least five examples I know of), setup EXEs missing (Wizardry 6) or requiring CDs unnecessarily (Prehistorik 1 and 2) which make me look for alternative options for games I have legally purchased, not to mention the large majority of point-and-clicks that only provide ScummVM as an option.