They do allegedly hack some game binaries to remove/disable copy protection, make workarounds/bug fixes when needed and possible also. They've had job postings on the site in the past also specifically listing these sort of skills for the given job. I wouldn't expect them really to spend more time or effort hacking up a given game's binaries to do much more than that though.

Disclaimer: I own only the original DOS release of Z, not the GOG nor the Steam release.

I'm a bit baffled that the current publisher of the game did not acquire the rights for the Zod engine and use it. This game engine runs Z under Linux (and Windows) perfectly fine.

See also http://zod.sourceforge.net/

That assumes a lot of things IMHO:
1) That the Zod project is legal and not in violation of the license of the original game they're attempting to clone. I haven't investigated it for this game personally, but the open source game engine Freecraft that cloned Blizzard's Warcraft II and Starcraft game engine was found in violation of the game IP and forced to shut down. The existence of an open source project cloning a game engine doesn't guarantee they have the legal right to do so, and even if they have not been sued doesn't mean that they couldn't be. Unlike trademark law, copyrights do not have to be defended rigourously by rights owners to retain their rights, so something can be in violation of copyright and getting away with it for months/years/decades and then get sued by the current rights owner suddenly. My point for mentioning this is that a game company isn't likely going to contact an open source project that might be violating their or someone else's copyrights to negotiate with them how to use their engine to make money. IMHO, such projects are legally ambiguous at best unless they have written legal permission or some other legally valid stance to protect themselves.

2) Is there any indication anywhere that the game company did /not/ try to contact them about this or is it just being assumed?

3) Is there any indication anywhere that the Zod project would like to hand their code over to a game company to sell it and make money from it?

There are legal ramifications of these sort of things that might not matter to the average person or even the average open source contributor/user, but which matter very much to corporations having to deal with real world intellectual property rights laws and issues. Something like what you're suggesting is certainly theoretically possible, but one shouldn't make any assumptions that it is automatically legal or that either side would even be interested (or not) in doing such, or whether they have already been in contact with the other in some way.

Personally I would think if it was something the game company would consider economically viable then they would have contacted that project and attempted to do something with it. I don't know who owns the legal rights to all of the underlying IP personally mind you, but these sort of things are generally a legal minefield and corporations tend to want to avoid legal minefields and also tend to not want to talk about such matters in public for many good reasons. :)

Remember too that "We haven't sued you yet" doesn't mean "We wont sue you in the future" nor does it mean "we don't have legal grounds to sue you" when it comes to these things. I'll admit that I haven't studied the Zod game engine website in detail nor done an exhaustive web search to try to find out myself, but I would doubt that they have the legal rights to reimplement the game engine in the first place let alone to negotiate to sell or pass them on to someone else. :)

Does Zod engine implements Z single player campaign? Is there a way to include cut-scenes from original Z (or remake) in similar way as in Freespace SCP?

HA! Whom should I send chocolates and wine to ? :-)

Thanks! That makes sense.

"simply sell" was a bad phrase to use on my part, since they do test and support everything sold like you said- which is one of the great things about the service. I'm sure there is some file/hex editing being done and they are creating DOSBox and Wine configurations, but AFAIK, there is no major editing to binaries/reverse engineering/compiling of game source code. Most games already have cracks for copy protections and CD checks so most of that work is already out there. I could be completely wrong, I don't have any inside information or know the inner workings of GOG, just what I've learned from reading the forum. Given the above, I don't think you would see the original Z here if they just had the source code and any fixes to the remake would be done by the dev (which it looks like they are working on).

Since whoever owns the rights to the original game is not willing to make it available, everyone is stuck with the remake.

Like me then, just knowing some tidbits about his implied work in games. ^^U

And that's sad. Sooo~ sad.

Now our hopes are deposited on a subjectibely bland and poorly made remake. But eh, who knows. Devs are willing to do it well, so maybe just the launch is a bad phase and this might become a good deserved one remake for us in the future. *crossing feet fingers lol*

Off-topicly: Nice talk, man (:

Thank you for posting this. I don't always follow every games social media channels. But it's great to see they plan on implementing updates to the controls and also support for older systems. It's great to see they weren't going to permanently "patch" XP out of the game :)

Thank you tfishell for being such a great member of the GOG community, for your helpful posts as well as your efforts in bringing over big name publishers/ I'm with you all the way :)

Hm. Doesn't look like much.

Now this is what I'm talking about.

Goes to show there is power in numbers of voices from time to time, good to see.

Wonderful!

One other question: Is the a source code available at all or is it lost in the past on some old bitmap brothers PCs? This question is a serious question because I absolutely can not understand why not to release the old DosBox/W95 version of the game.

quick question: only english voice-overs? Brazilian dub was so FREAKING awesome that I had to ask about it.

Loved more that translated dub than the game itself - and I do loved the game.