None taken :)
Yes that's true - well forum's not the same as before :/

Uff, I have it on my backup.
I detected a similar situation recently with one of the games in my library, but I can't rememebr which...

The new mac installer seems to be broken. After the developer logo the app directly quits. Also the filesizes of the new installer and the app are very small. The previous app was 320 MB while the new ons is just 180 MB big. The new updated Mac installer is with 138 MB also quite small this time. The installer was before 257 MB and now is only 138 MB big. The windows installer is still around 337 MB big, so I guess that one is fine.

You do? How? The extras were removed before you even joined.

After double-checking, what I have is a Bonus CD, not the soundtrack. =S
Is the bonus CD the developer CD? Cuz I still have it in my GOG library...

I don't think so. The developer CD is apparently the source code for the game, while the bonus CD contains various extras as detailed here:
https://www.introversion.co.uk/uplink/bonusdisk.html

Yeah, the GOGWiki page confirms that, they are different things...

Maybe one of the following?

Astebreed
Dracula 4+5
Lego Harry Potter

I don't think so. From those I only own Dracula 4+5, and both my GOG library and backup agree on that one: I have the soundtrack to Dracula 4.

EDIT: Looked around in the folders of the games I recently played or updated and still haven't figured it out. Maybe I saw wrong. =|

No, two completely different things.
Yeah, there are other games I noticed have oddities like this, but I'm trying to figure them out on my own first before posting about them. A number of them have FLAC soundtracks but where the currently available downloads only have MP3 soundtracks. I can't be certain about each individual game, but I think it is because the FLAC soundtracks were bogusly created from the MP3 version thus not actually being any higher quality than the MP3s but taking up and wasting several times more disk space. IIRC, someone used 3rd party software to algorithmically determine this and reported it and GOG did the right thing and removed the bogus FLACs, but I want to try to confirm the list of them before I delete the FLACs in case one of them is actually legit but got pulled for some other reason. I'll search through the thread first, I think it was circa 2 years ago this happened. If I can't find it I'll post the list later on though.

Some other games appear to have missing artwork or manuals which used to be there, and which do not appear that the files just got renamed or folded together, but I want to do some homework on them first too.

As far as FLAC soundtracks go I am completely clueless, I only backup the mp3 versions.

I just had a look at the contents of the developer_cd zip archive and can confirm that it does indeed contain the C++ source code of the game. Kind of funny because this game has a feature that one could consider to be DRM if I remember correctly, but now I have the source code of it so... so much for that DRM should it become a problem again in the future. ;)


That is particularly true with remote employees also. If you enjoy what you're doing beyond a threshold, and work as a remotee for a company you can end up working 7 days a week 16 hours a day if you don't have something to detach you. Companies seem to love that I learned, but it can be hard on the health. :)

Here.
Are you, perhaps, confusing Uplink with Defcon?

The latest update of my script will probably be of interest to those here.

I've added a link to the changelog (for games that have one) to the game pages to make spotting changes (and finding current version numbers) easier.

The difference is that MP3 encoded music has been subjected to mathematical transformation which discards a massive amount of the original audio source data which is mathematically determined to be considered on the inaudible side of things to the listener. This is known as lossy compression and while it is very good at preserving the overall general idea of the sound, it does discard data. This is not generally noticeable to the casual listener, but the careful listener can notice the degraded audio. For those who do not notice the difference, someone can explain how to listen carefully to certain audio and compare the uncompressed and MP3 encoded versions of a song and the person who previously didn't think they could tell the difference in almost all cases will be able to hear the difference after. Note that this is quite often something you do not notice unless you are purposesfully listening for it or listening carefully to the music. It is much more noticeable with slow quiet music that has a wider dynamic range than it is with something like speed metal. If the music is in the background and/or not at the focus of one's attention however then it isn't normally noticeable. If you're a musician however and say... carefully listening to the music to try to figure out a guitar solo or some other fine point of the music then the flaws of MP3 or any other form of lossy compression jump right out in your face with notes being lost or blurred or degraded very noticeably in certain passages etc. It gets progressively worse also if you use special software to slow down the tempo and/or change the pitch to be able to figure out the music due to multiple levels of digital signal processing stacked on top of each other occurring on the audio. Again though, to the casual listener of most music this is not usually consciously noticeable in the background.

FLAC on the other hand is non-lossy compression. It is like an audio version of a ZIP file in that it takes the original uncompressed raw audio directly off of the CD or WAV file for example, and compresses it using algorithms that take advantage of mathematical properties of music but which do not discard any of the information present. This means that it can compress audio to make it smaller than raw audio, but when decompressed the original unadulterated audio is preserved 100% with no losses and sounds identical to the original digital audio because it is actually the original audio. That is the primary benefit of FLAC encoding, that it preserves the original 100%. However since it doesn't throw away audio data algorithmically like MP3, OGG Vorbis, OPUS, AAC or other common lossy formats, it is not able to achieve the same dramatic level of compression those algorithms provide. Generally speaking, on the highest compression setting FLAC files will shrink the audio data down by 40%, whereas lossy compression shrinks the data down quite a lot more such as 92% smaller for example.

So generally those who prefer FLAC such as myself, do so because we don't want lower quality versions of the audio that have suffered through irreversible data loss being encoded to MP3 or other lossy formats because you can never ever hear the original crisp clear digital audio such as what you would get from an audio CD or WAV files, however FLAC preserves the original so you can convert the FLAC files to MP3, OPUS, OGG Vorbis or other formats yourself if need be, but still have the originals to listen too if you desire, or to be able to convert the original FLAC to some other future lossy format down the line. You always have the original undoctored audio.

Taking an MP3 or other lossy audio however, and converting it to FLAC is stupid because it does not improve the audio, instead it just decompresses the crappy quality MP3 audio once and then saves that copy in a FLAC file which takes up 8 times as much disk space or more with no benefit to the audio quality.

On modern computers with massive hard disk storage I find that it is very nice to be able to store all of my music in FLAC format wherever possible to preserve the audio 100% because disk space consumption really is not a problem on a modern PC. One 75 minute CD ripped to disk is about 650MB, but encoded as FLAC is about 350-400MB in size with identical quality audio. So I can fit around 3 audio CDs per gigabyte of storage. On a terabyte hard disk one can store about 2500-3500 audio CDs in FLAC format for example, so the extra space FLAC takes up compared to MP3 or other lossy formats is really not a concern anymore with modern computer storage. On mobile devices such as media players however, they seem to have limited themselves to a maximum of 8/16 or if you're lucky 32GB of storage unless you spend mad amounts of money, so storing FLAC audio on them would quickly gobble up all available storage unless one only owns a small amount of music. In such cases it is more storage-efficient to use a lossy format instead in order to have as much music as possible on the portable device at the expense of audio quality. In that case the best thing to do is to transcode the original FLAC audio to OPUS if the device in question supports the OPUS audio codec as it is the best lossy audio codec out there at the moment, having the smallest file sizes with the best audio quality available. OPUS is however fairly new and most people are unfamiliar with it even though it is an official open Internet standard and not all devices might support it yet. In that case, using OGG Vorbis would be the second choice, and then other formats. MP3 is among the worst in terms of audio quality though, but it's also one of the oldest which is why it has remained the most popular - it is the most well known.

I know a lot of people out there may not really understand what FLAC is all about so I hope my short explanation here takes some of the mystery out of it and helps some folks make some more informed choices instead of it being seen as some weirdo audiophile format as it really isn't. :)

Nopers...

F:\Games\GOG Galaxy Game Archives\uplink_hacker_elite\Extras removed by GOG for unknown reasons\uplink_developer_cd.zip\uplink_developer_cd\source\game

Update:

After posting that, I just thought a second and it dawned on me you were probably talking about the DRM thing rather than the source code. Rethinking that for a sec, you may indeed be correct about the DRM thing, might have got my games mixed up on that. Oops. :)