I just bought fallout2 recently and after installing it I found sfall is bundled inside. It's even quite a recent version (released in august 2012).

Is it necessary for fallout2 to be played in modern windows version? I just expect gog would provide "original" stuff in its installer only but not with any kind of mods.

And it actually give me a small problem since I am using wine. Well the problem is basically not caused by sfall itself but the launcher add by gog and probably for loading sfall. It could even crash the whole machine.

But indeed, fallout2 can be run fine in wine by using the original fallout2.exe, even with sfall loaded if desired by setting the override in winecfg, but I just think that it's better to exclude it. After all, we can download the latest version (the project is still active, isn't it?) ourselves from sourceforge, can't we?

By the way, the installer for the fallout series is not running fine in wine too, just luckily they can still work. See the attachement.

GOG doesn't offer "original" DOS games - they all are with DOSBox emulator... ;-) Try to delete sfall files (DDRAW.DLL and DDRWA.INI) and even goggame.dll. IMO it's not required if somebody wants to play. At least not under Win7... Of course, graphic (especially movies) could be crippled a little then.

Well I know. I don't want those "insert CDx" back too. But those cases are different from this. If it's not that essential for the Windows players, there is no reason for GOG to keep it there and add a launcher which could hinder some wine user from playing the game.

The game will run without them but movies and graphic will be corrupted. Wine users are minority and as opposed to "political correctness" minority don't rule in game industry... ;-)

Yeah but (un)fortunately wine is probably the best friend of those good old games.

Well, at least there is a reason then. Fine. But I guess I just don't like the "installer policy" of gog.com, which tends to pack everything up into one installer (but seperate them into part files when it's too big). Maybe for the expansions there are license problem, but a community tweak which is still active and everyone can download it from sourceforge?

Anyway I simply belongs to the paranoid group. I guess I should just let it be. Maybe I should put my effort to make the wish that fallout1 would be replaced with a US version when Bethesda got all the rights. I am silly, right?

sfall is bundled for fix and compatibility reasons only. A few things that I have turned on by default but are game changing in some way (e.g. item highlighting) are actually disabled by default in the GOG version. So it's not really being used in a 'community mod' sense.

If you're running on wine you can either delete sfall's ddraw.dll or set wine to use built in ddraw. Or you can hex-edit fallout2.exe and change all instances of ddraw.dll to patch.dll and rename sfall's ddraw.dll to match, if you want to be fancy about it.
Edit: Actually, if running on wine, I suggest you don't use the luncher either and just run fallout2.exe directly. The launcher is only required for fixing the 8 bit colour problem on windows vista/7. Setting up sfall to use dx9 would have fixed it too, but then the forums would be full of people complaining about the poor fps when they install the high res patch.

Also, sfall (and Killap's unofficial patch, which isn't in the GOG version,) are included in some other fallout 2 releases, so you'd possibly end up with the same problem even if you'd bought it elsewhere.

The best way is to use fallout2.exe. Sfall or not is up to winecfg then. The launcher actually crashes my whole system and I never got it work. This should be in the technical support/faq IF WINE IS SORT OF RECOGNIZED.

And the black installer window issue, too.

Wait, are you saying the GOG version of the Fallout games now include community patches and mods? When did that start? With the new 2.0 game installers? Do I even need to manually install the stand alone versions of unofficial patches like Killap's anymore?

No, I am not. I'm saying that killap's unofficial patch is included in some other distributions. It is not included in the GOG distribution.

Ah, I misunderstood, my bad. Thank god, I wouldn't want to have to try and figure out which games have community patches.

Interesting that other distributors sell them with community patches, i've never heard of that before.
It's mainly just the installer part of the games that have updated, no real changes to the game files to my knowledge, though I think I caught a post that said Shattered Steel had its DOSBox version updated.

I would wait a little before re-downloading those, I saw a post where the 2.0 installer version of Baldur's Gate II was having a problem, but I think GOG just fixed it a short time ago.