I was wondering if you knew how to deal with the original Tomb Raider from GOG?

I bought it and the installed game directory contains the music tracks in mp3 format, a game.dat (my guess, this is the cue sheet) and game.gog (this must be the bin file). However I'm unable to mount these in standard DosBox with 'imgmount d game.dat -t iso -fs iso' to copy the files over.

If I simply copy the directory to my retro rig and attempt to run the game by typing tomb, it will say it didn't detect the CD.

I guess the best case scenario was if I got the image burned to a CD-R or better yet if I was able to run the game with some sort of no-CD solution, but at the moment I'm stuck with what appears are non-standard image files.

Hi!

Tomb Raider is a good release as you can create a full installation CD with CDDA tracks!

The process is just like for this game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG8AIqy79Fo

- Convert the ogg or mp3 files to CDDA compatible WAV files
- Rename the BIN image to .ISO and mount it in daemon tools
- Burn a mixed more CD using the WAV files and mounted files in daemon tools

It will be a full Installation CD like in the boxed release 😀

I'm getting grey hairs over this.

Mounted image in Daemon Tools, converted the MP3s to WAV files but apparently they don't fit on a 700 MB CD with the data. It seems GOG didn't use the original DOS Tomb Raider release but some screwed up re-release that has IE and a whole bunch of other crap on disk. Would it really cost them that much to include the original un-effed disk image alongside their "tweaked" version?

I'm starting to think with the time wasted it would have just been easier to buy the more expensive "big box" release from eBay.

Sorry about the rant, has nothing to do with you.

Is that TR 1? Because I had no such issues...

Once you get to the early W95 games you won't have any hair at all 🤣

For these I bought the on eBay. Quite cheap actually. I'm not a fan of having non-digital games, but for these early 3D games it's a must. GOG.com hacked and patched (or butchered) them to run on modern machines, breaking compatibility on real hardware.

Nevermind. Looks like the other burning app which shall remain anonymous screwed up the mp3-to-wav conversion somehow. After using ffmpeg to convert the mp3s and InfraRecorder to do the actual burning, the disk turned out not to be even half full.

Strangely, installing the game on original hardware, I still get a bunch of mp3s in the installation directory. Either Tomb Raider was ahead of it's time, or then there's something else that's still fishy about the game. Is there always background music, or are the tracks only in specific places / scenes?

I really don't know that game well enough to answer that question I'm afraid.

I don't think I will find the time again to make more videos. So I will just make brief updates whenever I have a spare minute 😒

Took me a while to get Battle Isle 2 going, but here are the steps for the GOG.com Battle Isle Platinum pack.

BI, Moon, Desert and HL are easy. You just need to copy the folder and run the executable.

BI2 and Titan's Legacy took me ages to get going. I kept creating Installation CDs from the Images but ran into various glitches. It turns out that:

- The GOG.com version simply doesn't support Audio CD playback
- The executables are cracked or patched (seems to be a no-CD crack) but when installing from the CD the "unbeatable computer opponent" copy protection strikes

So for BI2 and Titan's Legacy:

- Copy each game folder onto your retro computer. E.g. I use C:\GAMES\BLUEBYTE\BI2 and C:\GAMES\BLUEBYTE\TITAN
- Create a sub-folder. E.g I use C:\GAMES\BLUEBYTE\BI2\CDROM
- Mount the BIN/CUE image in DAEMON tools and copy all the files into this CDROM sub-folder
- Run INSTALL.EXE to configure the Sound Cards but also enter the new path for the CD files. For BI2 this would be C:\GAMES\BLUEBYTE\BI2\CDROM

The two games will then work fine. Trying to play Audio CD tracks will result in nothing happening (same happens in DOSBox).

All in all a bit trickier and trying to make an original Installation CD led me down the wrong path, but great value with a ton of games.

Do study the manual for the single player codes for the first games 😀

Do you have a tip on how to quickly turn the GOG Quake into a DOS/Win95 playable?

leonardo wrote:

Do you have a tip on how to quickly turn the GOG Quake into a DOS/Win95 playable?

Quake release of GOG is retail Win Quake. Just burn the BIN / CUE onto a CD.

This is a handy topic, as I've started doing something similar for my "new" Retro PC with my previously purchased DOS GOG games. For the bin/cue/ogg (or game.gog, game.inst) things, I found that ImgBurn handles them perfectly as long as you have the Vorbis DirectShow filters installed. You just need to copy/rename game.inst to <whatever>.cue. Fair warning about ImgBurn though, the installer is somewhat tricky, and you need to carefully read it to avoid installing nuisance software.

I've successfully reburned Rayman and Blood this way. Rayman ended up with a functionally complete CD, so I could just re-install. Blood was a weird patchwork disc which I still needed to copy the installed files, but it worked fine when I did that.

I didn't have much luck with Syndicate or the Windows version of Tie Fighter, but the former is likely difficult to get running under even normal circumstances. I need to research it more either way. Tie Fighter actually includes the complete DOS CD image, so I have at least one method of running that on the retro machine.

Syndicate plus? I think it runs straight from the folder, but uses batch files. Can't remember the details though...

Yeah, that's what I saw, but I couldn't get it to do anything beyond the "select a game" menu. I'll investigate more when my AWE64 arrives; right now my retro PC doesn't really have DOS-compatible sound.

As others have said, Wing Commander 3 can be burned to DVD and installed, but you can ALSO copy the entire DVD to HDD and run without the disc 😉 Practically, it will need its own partition as it is about 1.8GB. Just set the savegame folder to the same directory and you're good to go (hopefully save games do not take more than 200MB!). In order to test this, I had to break my "beige-only" retro rule and put a black-face DVD optical drive in. It seems beige DVD readers are fairly rare.

I also confirmed some other game titles already mentioned:
-X-Wing Collector's CD (I have not tried yet if you can copy files over to play without CD)
-Strike Commander can be played without CD if you copy files over
-Ultima 7 Black Gate and Ultima 7 Serpent Isle just copy the install folder to your DOS machine. To save space, delete all non-DOS files (gog*.*, *.pdf, *.dll, *.ico, etc)
-Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 are the same as Ultima 7
-Wing Commander 1 and 2 are also the same as Ultima 7

Other games I can think off that have full CD images:

- Police Quest 4
- Gabriel Knight
- System Shock

Incidentally, I figured out the Syndicate issue: the launcher was sensitive to where the files are located on the drive. I had to place everything on the root for the launcher to find the game properly. I suspect this was originally one of the EA CD compilations that attempted to run from CD with config files on the hard drive.

For my purposes, I've already finished Syndicate recently in DosBox, so I'm in no hurry to try to organize things in a cleaner setup. I did try moving the application to another folder and running it directly by executing main.exe, which worked but I didn't have Sound effects. If someone has a better solution, I'm sure it will be useful to someone in this thread eventually. Maybe 😀

Sound is configured in the batch file, so if you have trouble, edit synd.bat. It should read something like this with I/O, IRQ, and DMA set to match your system settings.

1intro > nul: /iirq5 /idma1 /iio$220 /c0
2main > nul: /iirq5 /idma1 /iio$220 /c0

The GOG release doesn't HAVE a batch file. It relies on the launcher (SYND.EXE in the root folder) launching either the main game or expansion, and it probably feeds over the command line options that would traditionally be in a batch file. It looks like it stores its settings in SYND\SYND.INF. After opening this in a text editor, I realize it could probably be renamed to .bat and executed 😉. Here's the contents of my SYND.INF for reference:

1main /c0 /iirq7 /idma1 /iio220

The GOG release creates a virtual C drive with the following set of directories:
C:\DATA : Files for the launcher?
C:\DATADISK : Expansion
C:\SYND : Config files and saved games. Probably intended for remote storage from CDROM execution
C:\SYNDICAT : Original Game
C:\SYND.EXE : launcher

So yeah, it seems like you can take C:\SYNDICAT and move it somewhere else, copying C:\SYND\SYND.INF and renaming to SYND.BAT in the new folder. I think it will still end up storing your saved games in C:\SYND no matter what you do, though.

Have you confirmed that save games are redirected? That would require a patch of main.exe, something I suspect is not desirable for GoG or EA.

Confirmed. The saves will only save to C:\SYND\SAVE, and only if that folder already exists. I believe the American Revolt saves go in C:\SYND\SAVE2 judging by my GOG folder structure, but I didn't explicitly test that.

I don't think this was modified for the GOG release. I expect GOG simply got a CD-release of Syndicate Plus which was designed to run directly from the CD-ROM. Many of the EA Classics Releases were retooled to varying degrees to allow this. I know my Ultima Underworld I + II disc CAN be run directly from the CD, though in that case you can copy it to the hard drive without it saving in weird places.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

leonardo wrote:

Do you have a tip on how to quickly turn the GOG Quake into a DOS/Win95 playable?

Quake release of GOG is retail Win Quake. Just burn the BIN / CUE onto a CD.

There's a game.cue, a gamea.cue and a gamed.cue. No bins. Matching .gog files though.
I have a feeling this is going to be the same kind of mess Tomb Raider was.