Reply 100 of 145, by Yesterplay80
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wrote:That's a weird angle to take when you also integrate "more accurate FM synth"'s into your build. Saying "the user can't really tell" is not a good reason to reduce the quality on them. One should first make efforts to preserve the original media and data on them, then let the user decide if they want to save that space, don't make that decision for them. Internet bandwidth and disks are fast and large enough that you don't need to destroy your DOS games this way.
While regular HDDs with 1TB or even more are quite common, most people don't have SSDs with the same capacities yet, those with 256GB or 500GB are used much more. So, having games take up only 120-150 MB instead of 600-700 MB is definitely a nice thing if you have several of those installed, especially when you don't notice the difference between redbook audio or a high bandwidth OGG file.
About letting the user decide: Most regular users don't know jack about ripping CD audio, converting CD images, audio codecs, file bandwidths, editing cue files, etc. And they don't care, as well. Most just want to play games. Now, what if such a user decides he would prefer the smaller installation because he only has a smaller SSD? How would you, were you the publisher, handle this? Offer more download options, effectively increasing your infrastructure costs, for a probably small amount of users who actually know the difference?
GOG used to distribute the games with the full cd images (BIN + CUE) before, but switched to OGG audio some time later. IMHO the right decision, they distribute the games as convenient and efficiently packaged as possible. Leave preserving the full game discs to archiving services ike archive.org or institutions like the Video Game History Foundation. That's not the job of GOG or its customers.
If anyone feels the urge to use only full disc images for whatever reason, he can get them on archive,org, one of the many abandonware sites or just buy an original on Ebay instead of the download at GOG.
My full-featured DOSBox SVN builds for Windows & Linux: Vanilla DOSBox and DOSBox ECE (Google Drive Mirror)