Hi,

I would like it very much if GOG would stop butchering ISOs for DOSBox games.
I dont know how many games are affected, but I noticed it in Screamer.

I want to run Screamer in Linux, sadly there is no Linux installer, only Windows. OK so the Windows version has a BIN&CUE file which I could simply copy to Linux and mount in DOSBox, install and play. That would be easy.
Strangely the BIN/CUE are renamed, which is totally unnecessary, are you trying to hide what it really is?
But worst of all if you mount the image, you notice it only contains the audio and 2 files, but not all the files you need to install the game. These have been ripped out.

OK, if you do not rip these, you might increase the installer by a few megabytes, but I think that would not be a big
problem, with the benefit of having a crossplatform image file which is also more future-proof.

Is it just me, or would other people also like this butchering to stop?

Can't you just copy the entire DOSBox installation instead of just the bin/cue?
Seems like that would be easier.

In my experience the ISOs are fine. Just rename .gog files to ,iso files. Basically just change the file extension(s).

Sometimes it's as easy as renaming the game.gog to game.iso, but not always. I don't understand why they do it either, sometimes it's like they used black magic to make the games work. I agree with the OP.

dosbox doesn't care what the image file extension is, so there is no reason to rename the file. The biggest issue is that cue files sometimes contain names that are Windows-specific (e.g. case-insensitive) and hence need manual editing to work under linux. But this is easily fixed, just a bit annoying.

Like Smannesman said, just copy the whole thing and fix paths in .conf files. It should work most of the time.

It would be a HUGE problem. Including the full ISOs would blow up many games to more than 700 Megabytes. Depending on the game that's an increase of more than 1000% compared to what GOG provides. You may not care about it but I certainly do, as do many others, particularly without access to a stable broadband connection or who have limited traffic (yes, still a serious issue depending on where you live, even in "highly developed" countries). And I, for one, appreciate that installing two little DOS games that happened to use audio tracks back in the day won't take up an entire gigabyte if shedding redundant data and compressing the music gets them down to like a hundred MB or even less.I only want them to stop removing stuff that is necessary to get a game's full functionality. In some cases (like Wing Commander 1 and 2) the setup files were removed, making it hard or impossible to change certain settings like the sound device used by the game. That's unforgivable.

Do you perhaps have a better method you'd like to share with the GOG team?

What's the reason GOG is not offering all DOSBox games with a Linux installer in the first place? Is it licensing or technical issues?

Well, even though I don't mind the "butchering" at all, I WOULD actually appreciate if GOG additionally allowed to download unaltered CD/DVD image files as bonus content where legally possible. Unlike OP I don't need to install GOG titles on OSes not officially supported by GOG but in some cases GOG omit stuff that I would appreciate for a variety of not always practical reasons. For example some old games had pretty impressive custom installers that just were part of the original experience and it's a bit sad when those aren't included. I always wondered the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a pipeline issue. GOG may internally require a full QA process and a number of other things for each separate platform even if theoretically even an automated process should be able to convert their Windows library of DOSBoxed titles to Linux releases or something.

One can probably also expect legal issues. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the licenses GOG signed, especially before they officially started supporting Mac and Linux, explicitly covered only Windows as a target platform and it takes time to updated all the licenses or the licensors are less communicative or open-minded than they were when they first signed a deal with GOG.

I agree with this (as I said other Nth times).
I wish that Gog always used the unaltered game files\images + their separated setup exe.
However, I don't expect any change at this point.

No you like OS X?
In almost all cases it's not technical issues.

well, in the case of Screamer it would add at most 19 MB more to the installer. so 216 MB instead of 197 MB. Not a huge difference.
The CD audio in this game is not compressed, just a plain image file containing the uncompressed audio.
And the 19 MB are hypothetical, because the redundancy in the files would get compressed probably even more by the installer.

I don't like the files being in a non-standard format: It can prevent front-end programs from recognizing them. Or allowing configuration. Either way, not good.

Anyone know a Window front-end that is compatible with GOG's format?