If Galaxy won't allow to just download and check integrity of installers, patches and extras for backup (without actually installing games or updates), yes, I'd like to still have the option to use the GOG Downloader for that.

Hmm, this gets me thinking... How about including some Kali-like functionality? (I know Kali is an IPX wrapper, just saying for comparison) This way, oldies with LAN support (i.e. Duke 3D, HoMM series) could use the service.

DOSBox already supports IPX. What would be required is a And if DOSBox already supports serial network, then it should intercept the serial communication from the game and translates it to ethernet or GOGGalaxy one.

My take is if Galaxy allows direct-IP multiplayer (that doesn't require GOG's servers) or some other GOG-server-free multiplayer method in addition to providing a match-making service (that does use GOG's servers), it's not DRM. In that case, any verification that at least one of the players holds a valid GOG key is only restricting use of the match-making service and is not preventing multiplayer gaming.

If, on the other hand, "galaxy games" won't let you play multiplayer over the internet without the approval of GOG's servers, then it's DRM. (It doesn't even require that it verifies you're a legit buyer to be DRM -- the fact that them pulling the plug on their servers also pulls the plug on your ability to play multiplayer already makes it DRM.)

^ This.

Well since Galaxy should be able to connect people from different services (non-GOG), they can't really validate ownership, can they?

Which at best simplifies the network-client side of IPX down to Ethernet. But GOG still has to implement (or license from someone else) the "server side" (which is going to have to emulate ethernet/IPX/IP switching/routing/naming/etc hardware and emulate the non-switchy-nature of direct serial connections) and there will need to be some protocol for getting the galaxy connection into the right mode. (There's also configuring the DOSBox for the given game, but that part would probably be easy as it doesn't require any UI as GOG can just hard-code it into the DOSBox config on a per-game basis.) There's a lot of crap in network stacks, and if something doesn't work (a game isn't "happy") figuring out what magic bits it's waiting for is likely going to involve a decent debugger with a disassembler and someone who knows how to read raw stack frames and make sense of it all and has a lot of time on their hands.

Well, I'm sure you can just take the above and submit it to the DOSBox team. Done! :-P


Ditto. Running backups on installed games is stupid and useless -- I need the downloaded installers sitting someplace where I can back them up. If I need to restore from backup, I'm going to need to reinstall, which means I need the installers.

Yes, they can "validate ownership" (require a GOG key). They can't require everyone have a GOG key (as that obviously wouldn't support cross-play), but they can require that at least one of the players has a GOG key. E.g., I don't think GOG intends to connect steam players with desura players (with no GOG players in the game), but who knows -- maybe they've come up with some kind of distributed scalable match-making service that actually makes use of the PCs of all gamers attached to the service so they can scale out like that and it doesn't cost them a penny in extra server capacity, but that's a much harder problem to crack than just making your own match-making service run on your own servers so I doubt it.

Personally, I like how the GOG Downloader works, it's perfect for me in that I control what & when I download (very handy for a slow low-cap connection) & I don't play mp games

So, Game sends out IPX packets, DOSBox intercepts them, passes them through Ethernet to GOGGalaxy server, GOGGalaxy server translates those Ethernet packets back to IPX and passes them to the server. Server sends out IPX packages, which get translated to Ethernet packages and sent back to the DOSBox client.
So GOG will need the server software, but the network part should already be covered by DOSBox.

Actually, I just and DOSBox has IPX tunnelling over UPD/IP <span class="bold">and</span> an IPX tunnelling server built in. What GOG has to do to use that is do the equiv of IPXNET STARTSERVER on one of the client machines and then direct all of the others to that machine. (That's still not trivial code to write robustly as it requires coordination between multiple machines and proper error recovery. Distributed network code is always a pain unless you're running on top of some kind of platform that (mostly) takes care of error cases for you.) The situation looks similar for [url=http://www.dosbox.com/DOSBoxManual.html#Multiplayer]serial nullmodem cable emulation -- DOSBox has built-in TCP tunnelling for that. GOG software just needs to coordinate the set up to get all the machines running.

So in both cases GOG just needs to do setup work, and once it's started DOSBox does all the work. (There's still issues that could sink that though, like NATs screwing things up. Never underestimate how !@#$-up networking can be.)

Tell me about it. I've given up on trying to connect two routers at home (one for DSL, other to extend the network) since they don't wish to cooperate through WDS, and even using a TL-PA211 doesn't do the trick. Only way I've managed to have them talking to each other is through a direct ethernet connection, which obviously defeats the purpose of using two routers to extend the wi-fi.

True, nothing to do with the subject at hand, just some network woes of me :(

So, GOG Trading Cards?

I do.
It's "good old games", right?