When did GOG ever state they were about preservation? They're about taking old games and fixing them up to run on modern systems which is EXACTLY the case here. Your ideals != GOG's ideals.
You're not mad that you can't take Duke Nukem 3D's installer to a Win 95 machine and install it directly. You're only upset because this directly affects you. I understand that, but you're making it out to be a bigger deal than it is.

1. I didn't say/write that.
2. Duke Nukem 3D was a DOS game and not a Win95 game.
3. Yes, there'd be something missing/wrong if it didn't come with the originial files needed to run it in DOS,
which are there in all DosBox packages btw, so no need to complain there besides the downgraded audio tracks in some games which also was a topic around here sometimes.

Video game preservation however always was one of their selling points regardless of any mission statement, see also several articles:
https://www.google.de/?gws_rd=ssl#q=gog.com+video+game+preservation
To me, including the original files is a must and if available also including the source code in the goodies section would be nice.

In the first years, GOG was strongly supported by the Abandonware scene, Abandonia for example posted advertising for it all over the place and they replaced all links to files on their game-cards by links to GOG's game-cards as soon as they were available.

In order to be able to make a game run on any future system (that may not yet exist), the original files are always the best basis right after the source.

Could you check your PMs :)

GOG has not in the past added the API to games, developers have... it would be unlikely that GOG added achievements or anything like that. Why? Because that typically requires source code access which GOG does not have. It also requires development time. The only thing we know of that they have been known to add is cloud support and overlay support, and that us because they developed it in a way where they could do that. You don't need source code access. So like I said, unless they found a way to interact with the Steam API using the Galaxy API so that no changes are needed then it's very unlikely GOG had anything to do with at least that part.

It isn't just GOG that is pushing Galaxy, devs want access to a SDK like Galaxy. They want the Steam experience. They believe it adds value to the product and it also make development easier in the case of online MP support and stuff like that because it provides a set of API's that they can work with.

There is a reason Steam is popular among developers...

Good news, guys.
Fallout: New Vegas's store page was updated.
Windows XP was added to "Works on:" (Works on: Windows (XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10) ). \o/

That is actually pretty awesome and kinda restores a bit of good will towards GOG from the good old gamers.

Oddly enough, Fallout 3 and Oblivion, which still worked fine in XP out of the box didn't get this mention on the game-cards. Then again, I'm just happy that they work.

Has anybody tried it yet and what files were changed? Probably the GalaxyWrp.dll.

Edit:
Oh...

Damn it... :(
I thought the changes were made (fnv, f3 and oblivion were removed from my wishlist).

Is there any info about will WinXP will work or not, will Bethesda fix theirs installer? I'm not asking to support Windows XP OS of course.
Just a small fix to the installer should suffice, if it's possible.

Who says GOG never fixes anything? o.O

Who put galaxywrp.dll in Fallout: New Vegas, GOG, or Bethesda?

It's not very safe to have an internet-connected Win XP system these days, is it?

Not at all.

But good luck convincing the neo-luddites that XP shouldn't be used. It worked for them over a decade ago and now they'll cling to it until the hardware that supports it finally gives up the ghost.

I think the talk is not about Wine, but about setting up a fast virtual machine (like VMWare) and then setting up direct access to GPU (VGA passthrough).

This way, virtualized guest operating system has direct access to VGA. So, that leaves what to run in VM - and the OS with smallest footprint is - XP.

This method guarantees 100% compatibility, because it runs as-is using VGA directly and should be better for corner cases when wine can't be 100% compatible (anticheat, clients and such), has problems running the title, or GPU driver on linux has problems - too slow implementation of some functionality in driver or in Wine.

Downside is of course, CPU overhead for running guest system (but wine also introduces some CPU overhead for translations, except running gallium9' enabled version) and necessary space for guest OS (few gibibytes). And VMware is either problematic to setup or not free.


Here is a good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-aZ0KpeVPI

Actually, I just learned that tonight. It was most informative.

Previously, I'd get a new laptop with the latest version of Windows on and I'd dual boot.

I assumed most Linux users did the same when they got a new computer with Windows on it.

My latest Thinkpad is the only laptop where I did not do this, because I have both an SSD and a HDD and Lenovo's factory installer will only install Windows on the SSD (and I want it on the HDD as the SSD is for Linux).

Honestly, I'm not 100% sure if I'll buy a new generic copy of Windows just to dual boot it on my HDD and play games. My previous computer had dual-boot and I was always too lazy to reboot on Windows, resulting in my always picking Linux games from my backlog to play.

At this point, I might make my previous laptop (which has an aging GPU) a gaming-only laptop with Windows and only purchase Windows -only games if they will run on it (ie, nothing too demanding on the GPU).

Alternatively, I might try to launch Windows on a VM with GPU passthrough (my hardware supports it) and it that case, I'd consider purchasing Windows to play games on my new laptop, but I have a conundrum here in that I would no pay money for a new version of Windows until I see it work well on a VM with GPU passthrough and I'm not sure I can see it in action without paying for a new version of Windows.