I am pretty familiar with the GOG way of doing things. .gog files are usually the bin or iso file and the .inst file is the cue file. With Shattered Steel I noticed GOG is using more of a crippled install. 8bit sound instead of 16bit which was an option in the original game and if you load a cue file in DOSBox the original CD music will play in the game, but not in GOGs version. So I renamed "ssteel.gog" to "ssteel.bin" and "ssteel.inst" to "ssteel.cue" and then mounted the image. All that is there is ssteel.exe with 0k bytes even though the image file is 300+ MB. Anyone know what's going on here. Short of buying this on CD and getting the full experience could someone enlighten me why GOG did this and how to get around it? Most of GOG titles you can just rename the ISO files and do a manual install if you like, but not in this case it looks like which is disappointing. Any help would be great.

What is a .gog file? Of the many games I have from here I have not seen a .gog or .inst file? Your get the exe and the bin files and this comprises the installer. From that each game has its own files which are copied in from the installer. It may just be something odd with that game ask support, it maybe you just need an ini change.

Just a renamed image file. GOG does this with some of their titles. Especially common in their older DOS CD version titles. They just rename bin and iso files with a .gog extension and you can just rename it back and mount it. The cue files usually have a .inst extension which you just rename back to cue. This usually works in most cases, but they have done something different with Shattered Steel. Either way, not a big deal, ordering a used copy of the game on CD cheaper than GOGs price and plan on doing a manual DOSBox install later next week and getting a better experience out of the game. It is just unfortunate they locked up the CD image. I was just wondering if someone with more knowledge than I had a clue what they did to the image file.

There is some great in game music in Shattered Steel that GOG omitted in their image (or just inaccessible) and 16-bit sound as well.

Uhm, yes...? You didn't expect the music to be files in the disc image file system, did you? In all likelyhood, the music is actual redbook audio tracks. You won't see those in a file explorer. Have you tried playing the image in a media player? The audio tracks should be there.

I'm downloading it right now to check, but I am quite certain that is the case.

Alternatively, in some cases GOG has made .OGG files out of the original audio tracks, but in that case they won't be in the image, but in a folder in the game's installation folder. At any rate, you can see which method is used if you look in the .cue (.inst) file.

Look guys, I am VERY familiar with how file system structures work and virtual environments/hardware. So, no, I did not expect to see files. Let's get the condescending tone removed please. What I am interested in is whether the GOG image is the full image from the CD or it is a crippled version. It is well known DOSBox will play the CD audio in-game with the cue file mounted. I do it all the time with my images from my original DOS CDs. Not so with this GOG release. So I was wondering if anyone had an idea what is up with this GOG image? Just curious if I am missing something here. Either way, CD is on the way and I will have an answer soon.

So it looks like the audio is there when you do a playback in Windows from the cue file which of course you have to edit the cue file to point it to the renamed bin file. That is promising. Now to figure out why it is not playing back in missions in the game in DOSBox like my other DOSBox games. I still can't figure out why the 300+ MB bin file, once mounted, is absent of any data other than ssteel.exe which clocks in at 0k bytes.

Quick stupid question. You did edit the renamed .cue file to point to the .bin instead of the .gog it points to, right?

Oh yeah, I finally solved it. When I rename the ssteel.gog to ssteel.bin and ssteel.inst to ssteel.cue and then edit the cue file to obviously point to the proper bin file the in-game music now works perfectly in every mission. I suppose DOSBox does not like the .gog and .inst extensions? Have no idea.

I am going to completely reinstall and try something. I can't believe GOG would not have this nailed down right from the start. Sometimes when I do too many changes I just reinstall and start over... for science of course. :-)

So other than the 300MB+ bin file being what looks like just a dummy file with no actual data in it it seems they removed the setup.ini file so you can't set 16-bit audio. Adding that file back in from the original CD allows you set the audio up for 16-bit. Will be doing that once my CD arrives. The conf file is a total mess as well out of the box from GOG and needs some serious tweaking to make the game run properly. Also updated the DOSBox it is using. Good for now and glad I could get it running well like the good old days.

There isn't an article on TCRF so whatever you found wasn't interesting enough to make an article of.

I wish that GOG could leave the original game images intact, instead of removing setups and other things. :\
And using 1 DOSbox with different configs (instead of 1k copies) wouldn't be bad either..

I am not quite sure what you mean???

It's a wiki tracking beta elements, cut things, and other such missing bits from games.

So for a normal person with only the GOG version, is this now achievable without having access to the original CD version (or CD image) of the game, or does one still need the original soundset.exe/setup.ini file from the original game?

Have you now written down all the steps needed in order to enable the better quality music in the GOG version? I think that would be nice as the game does have wonderful music IMHO, reminds me of the Aliens movie music.

Mind you, I do have the original CD retail version, even finished the game many many years ago (in the hardest difficulty even, quite a challenging game). I have shortly tried playing also the GOG version, I recall it had an issue with e.g. laser weapons missing the target constantly and that was apparently a CPU timing problem which could be fixed by changing the game speed within DOSBox.
I personally prefer each GOG game being as self-contained as possible. It reduces the risk for compatibility problems (if e.g. some game actually works better with a different DOSBox version, than another game).