toxicTom: Ha! Got Gothic to work finally!
ElTerprise: Congrats. How did you convice the game to start :).
I found a forum entry here on GOG (but via Google) that described that various processes might prevent Gothic from starting properly. The game is "waiting for them". So the way to go is to launch the game, and while the exe lurks in the background, use Task manager to kill processes until the "blocking one" is found. I'm not sure, but I think in my case one of the Logitech drivers may be the problem.
Of course it wasn't that easy, after killing a number of processes I saw Gothic launch just to crash instantly with an "Access Violation". So I googled this one and found an unofficial patch called "System Pack", that not only is supposed to fixed problems like that, but also has numerous other fixes, i.e. more widescreen resolutions with fixed FOV. Installed that one et voilá!
Played until I reached The Old Camp (or whatever it's called in English), no problems so far except for some polygon flickering in dialogues - a little annoying, but doesn't always happen, and even when, only every few seconds.
The reason I wanted to install Gothic is that I want to take a serious take on The Witcher 2. Sound strange? ;-)
Yeah, well my kids love to watch me play RPGs. They always want to play games like Oblivion, Skyrim, Two Worlds (1+2), Divinity 2... But Witcher 2 is too "dangerous". I don't want to combine gaming with sex education... I let them watch me play the first Witcher on my second play-through (after I had read the books), because I knew where the... interesting scenes were and I would avoid them until I was alone.
It's not that I'm prude or anything. But I don't want to have my kids see Geralt and Triss getting it on and a) have to explain what the hell they are doing (kind of takes the enjoyment out of the scenes) and b) have them chit-chat about it school and kindergarten. I mean the time when people lived in community (long-) houses and among cattle and kids learned about the wonders and methods of procreations pretty early are long past...
So Gothic for the kids and Witcher 2 for me. Usually I wouldn't play two big RPGs in parallel, but I've beaten Gothic twice already (many years ago). So I don't need that much concentration on the story. Also, for the first time, the kids will be able to understand what the people in the game are talking about - I'm thrilled to see how that works out.