Can someone take a downloaded GOG game, and remove
the guts, and play it in regular DOS, or are the files dependent
on DOSBOX?

There is no specific "DOSBox dependency". Games that run on DOSBox can, by definition, be made running on regular DOS as well. You have to provide the right environment for the game of course (something that DOSBox and GOG's configuration file ought to do for you otherwise)..

Same here.

I think he's actually perfectly logical and made a valid comment.

I do have difficulties understanding _your_ logic though.

I have a netbook with an Intel Atom processor. This CPU wasn't designed when lots of the games in GOG's catalog were originally released. Hence, this processor is "Sci-Fi" by your definition and should run these games? That doesn't make sense. No matter when exactly a CPU was designed, you have to take into account the usage scenario it was meant for. Intel Celeron processors were always meant to be low-cost, low-performance - and the GeForce 4 MX 440 was _especially_ low performance, in fact its very name is borderline false advertising.

For DOS games, follow the advice already given - play the games in native DOS. For Windows games, contrary to your expectation, there is no emulation layer in effect that could be turned off (with a handful of exceptions, like Thief, which received an engine update). Your current machine is simply much weaker than you apparently expect it to be.

Edit: That said, you are correct in stating that the system requirements for many GOG titles are higher than they were for the originals. You can check the original requirements on mobygames, and they are indeed much lower than your current system.

"You have to take into account the usage scenario it was meant for"

Original games fits perfectly into this usage scenario, several are tested ten or more years ago. Why GOG ones doesn't? GOG games "Good old games for good modern rig". This is silly.

I don't get YOUR point here, are you REALLY trying to say that old games are not meant to run well machines of same era, or on better rigs...?

"Your current machine is simply much weaker than you apparently expect it to be"

Wrong! I know how weak it is and i select games according it weaknesses.

"That said, you are correct in stating that the system requirements for many GOG titles are higher than they were for the originals. You can check the original requirements on mobygames, and they are indeed much lower than your current system."

Thank you, at least this one made some sense...

"GOG titles are higher than they were for the originals."

GROSSLY higher:

Darkstone 1999:

System required:
CPU Type: Pentium
CPU Speed in MHz: 233MHz
RAM: 32MB
Hard Drive Space: 170MB
CD Drive Speed: 8X
Video Card: 3D AGP
Color Depth: 16-bit
Compatible Devices:
Software (DirectX 5.0, etc.): DirectX 7

Darkstone GoG:

MINIMUM system requirements:

1.8 GHz Processor, 512MB RAM (1 GB recommended),
3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended),
2GB HDD,
Mouse, Keyboard.

I should avoid GoG, but sadly, originals are no more around..

Yes it's rather flabbergasting how much CPU power emulating some games on DOSBox requires, like some of the 3D games. Especially when you consider the tiny system requirements that they had on native MS-DOS.

Not as bad as PS2 or Gamecube emulation though.

Darkstone is not DOS game. Several GOG ancient games requires a system that can run freaking Doom 3!
That would be solution! If there is way to disable it...

PS: All games i mentioned in this thread (Except Doom3 obviously) had original requirements for system well below my rig. And none of them are DOS game.

Yes, there is... Seriously, it can't be that hard :P

I never paid attention to the specs back then but if you're correct and the specs have been raised since GOG resurrected the games then I would think it has to do with overcompensation seeing as these old games were never optimized for recent OS's and configurations but rather ran through an emulator (DOSBox).

This is the same reason as to why you can play modern day games like Skyrim on PC but when running some old and uglier Playstation 2 games through PCSX2 they suck up all your system resources and can often times lock up and crash the PC.

In short, your PC is doing more thinking now then it did then because it has to think outside of it's current setup and then think about how to pretend it is an older OS and hardware.

EDIT:

I guess the best metaphor I can give is

Let's say your a Windows 98 game speaking English and residing in Windows 98 which is the USA
but
you take a trip to Spain/Window XP
Now you have to translate English to Spanish to get anywhere.
You make a good friend in Spain and she travels with you to Japan/Windows 7
Now you have translate English to Spanish and then Spanish to Japanese.

Which is going to slow down the communication process and require meatier hardware if you want to compensate and speed things up a bit.

Doom 3 isn't a good example really, id downsampled a lot of the textures and gutted a lot of stuff in the game to make it run on consoles. The original Doom using brutal doom mod probably uses more system resources than Doom 3.

Actually, Darkstone needed a Pentium II (333 Mhz) to work well. I still have the original disk and it will run too fast on most moder computers.

Now, the problem as I see it is twofold.

On one side, Gog probably has to slow down the games to make them usable on modern computers. When dosbox is being used, you will be able to modify the parameters to cope with the relative underperformance of a Celeron.

On the other side, the requirements in Ghz are not that meaningful. We all use different generations of hardware. How does that 2700 Mhz Athlon compare to that 2400 Mhz core i7 ? I run most of my Gog games on a 1600Mhz E-450. Those that don't work have more problems with the graphhic part of the APU than with the clock speed of the CPU.