alekasm: Oh I'm not looking for any compensation really, although a few extra bucks could help me pay for both SSL certificates and code signing certificates ($80/yr, $200/yr respectively). I've tried numerous times contacting EA games and their email back was almost incomprehensible, it just sounded like they didn't want me redistributing their stuff (hence why the patcher route is also a good choice for SimCopterX).
If GOG has a close relationship with Electronic Arts I'd love to see if we can get SimCopter back up for the masses. One of the main reasons I embarked on this journey was my heavy disappointment for SimCity 2000 SE being sold on the EA/Origin store - which was just the old game packaged with DOSBox with no native support.
tfishell: (You could at least ask for affiliate links, and if people purchase through those URLs, you get a small commission. I like GOG but don't undersell yourself. ;)
Yeah I don't know if GOG could get the Win95 version of SC2k working these days or not. The version on Origin is the version on GOG too; many people were disappointed that it was the DOS version but, well, at this point it is what it is. In recent years there have been a few fanmade patches for the network edition I think (and I let GOG staff know about them), but I guess that just didn't work out.
Whatever GOG's current "relationship status" is with EA (I imagine they aren't on bad terms but EA is still way more massive than GOG so perhaps getting EA's attention is tough), I'd again heartily encourage you to reach out to GOG and at least let them know. :) Even if that doesn't work out, at least you're giving people a way to play the games on modern machines.
I'm not surprised by the email, a lot of business and lawyer-speak I imagine. You could also post on the Origin forum:
https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion/bd-p/origin-general-discussion-en - they have some community folks there who aren't so "corporate".
Not a ton of votes but a decent number:
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/sim_copter https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/simcopter https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games#search=streets%20of%20s&order=votes_total edit: I almost forgot that apparently nGlide supports Simcopter and Streets but perhaps not well enough to support re-releases?
http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide/compatibility Thanks a ton for your posts and resources, super motivational. I'm not sure about "nGlide" but the original game did come with the glide.dll but it was sort of.. experimental? With certain versions of the game Glide was technically loaded but nothing more than that, while in other later versions it was supported but only as an optional command line argument. The inherent issue with the game was the single game loop running all the logic, which of course runs too fast on modern processors.
The SimCopterX patch simply adds a detour to a Sleep function after the "PeekMessage" routine (Windows stuff) to fix this specific problem.
After taking a look on the nGlide site, it looks like its compatible with version "1.02", which is analogous with Version 1.2 - which was the rollback for SimCopter to remove the infamous himbo easter egg event. Also I believe with that command-line argument for SimCopter - I think it only puts you in some sort of experimental mode (could be wrong). In Streets of SimCity glide was generally more supported and integrated right from release.
