This is good, because Cinemaware made a bunch of interesting games, that I'd love to play, and sad at the same time, because there are a lot more great Amiga titles out there. If you ever happen to get your hands on Ambermoon, you'd have a game that I would instantly buy.

YES! :D

Any chance the Three Stooges will be coming to gog?

This is in our plans - stay tuned!

Will any of the Amiga only Cinemaware games that never had a DOS version made be released on GOG? Biggest example: Antheads: ICFTD 2. Possibly included with ICFTD 1, since it was an expansion pack?

YES!

Is there a Linux version of Cinemaware emulator?

No...

Hah, that was similar to my experience. I was only exposed to the NES version of this game. Being a kid, I didn't get what the game was actually about. All I saw was knights jousting and had to rent it.

Too bad, because there are open Amiga emulators which are cross platform, like uae / fs-uae for example.

http://fs-uae.net
http://winuae.net

Is Cinemaware very different from them?

It even shows that fs-uae can run Defender of the Crown: http://fs-uae.net/i/fs-uae/front5.png
Somewhat surprising that GOG use open emulator for DOS, but went with the closed one for Amiga OS.

While I personally agree they should have used something more open, if for nothing else then to have a much larger workforce working on it. I wonder if the legal issues alluded to earlier are a large part of the reason.

All that being said, I hope if they keep with their own engine for whatever reason, they take into consideration Linux.

How did Cinemaware emulator manage to bypass those issues then? If they pay a license to whoever owns those ROMs (Hyperion Entertainment?), GOG could do something similar but using the open emulator for instance.

UPDATE: I found this: http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=64006

So obviously Cinemaware are paying to Hyperion or got some kind of partnership. But then I guess GOG pays them for the emulator itself? In such case they could use the open one since it's cross platform and pay to Hyperion the same way, but at least then they won't exclude all non Windows users. Cinemaware would get paid for games themselves anyway, so everyone will be happy.

And making original games embedded into an executable isn't really nice too, it's close to being DRM using some obfuscation to prevent using them with other emulators. It's not unlike LucasArts - Disney releasing a crippled version of Loom on Steam which didn't work in ScummVM.

Yeah, we have enough of that already.
And can be of benefit to the other parties involved too. ;)

The thing is that as I wrote earlier, it is Amiga Inc. (which is basically a carcass) the real owner of the intellectual property known as kickstart roms and amiga os (3.9 and earlier). Hyperion went to court and won the right to use them "ro help amiga os 4 further development". The thing is that emulating cinemaware games has NOTHING to do with amiga os 4, so they are hiding the kickstart inside the executable to prevent any lawsuits from Amiga Inc.

BTW, I can bet 20 to 1 that cinemaware didn't created lobster from scratch, the 68000 emulator alone is hundreds of man hours and doing the amiga chipset is tad more complicated (after years of development winuae is still ironing some bugs) so they are probably just recompiling winuae and hiding all the configuration from the user. if they had used fs-uae they could offer a linux version. But they will never accept they are using open source code because they would have to share the source and depending on the license, you might not be able to include in the executable anything that is not open source (like the kickstart roms).

This is in a nutshell the reason GOG has steered away from releasing amiga games. But as I have said earlier, a free kickstart rom (the aros kickstart) is being developed and could be used in the near future to play games. In the present there is already a quite polished open source rom for the atari st (EmuTOS) so it beats me why they haven't give it a try.