Are there any plans to add support for Mac games in the future? I guess at least some of the older games have Mac versions available that could be offered here...

I tried searching the forum as I thought somebody must have had that idea (pretty sure of that) but searching for "mac" or "macintosh" turned up nothing. :-/

We wound up with a pretty big argument with a different user (Who was pretty self entitled and was rather poorly trying to sell the idea).

In any case, no, GOG does not officially support Mac, Linux, and... whatever the hell the google one is called. The different people and users on this site will though. Most of the time running a GOG game on mac means converting it to the mac compatible version of Dosbox. Others simply prefer to either emulate a Microsoft OS, but there's other options including installing it as a second OS and of course just having a secondary computer.

We'll be happy to help you though with whatever you need.

A lot of forum software doesn't recognize search terms that are three characters or less, so doing a search for "Mac" or "Mac OS X" turns up nothing. Hardly anyone calls it the "Macintosh" anymore (unless you're Tim Cook) so that won't be of much help either.

If you want to search the forums, look for things like WINE, DOSBox, ScummVM, and CrossOver or Wineskin. CrossOver and Wineskin are the two leading distributions of WINE on Mac OS X; WINE is the miraculous compatibility layer which allows many Windows apps to work on Linux and OS X without Windows...DOSBox and ScummVM are similar cross-platform compatibility layers/emulators which allow many older GOG games to work in OS X.

To answer briefly your question, it's a matter of licensing and support. In the case of the former, many Mac ports were made and sold by third-party companies - many of which don't exist anymore. It's hard enough to negotiate the rights to sell games as they are already, without them doing it all over again for Mac ports.

In the case of the latter, many Mac ports only run on PPC/Mac OS 9/Classic...which means they won't run on any Mac running 10.6-10.7, depending on the game. Fixing this would more often than not require rewriting a port; this would effectively mean that GOG wouldn't just be selling a Mac version...they'd be porting games too!

And that's on top of the fact that they've got a hard time supporting games for Win 7/Vista; they're just too small right now to devote the resources to supporting games on OS X/Linux, even if they can work in WINE, DOSBox, or ScummVM.

That doesn't matter much to most of us anyway (except for that one excessively arrogant guy) - because getting GOG's titles as they are to work on Linux or the Mac is surprisingly easy. You can see for yourself here:

CrossOver Compatibility Centre (C3): http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/
WineHQ Application Database (winedb): http://appdb.winehq.org/

And of course my own GOGmix: :) http://www.gog.com/en/mix/mac_friendly_gog_games_4

Even if you're too cheap to pay for CrossOver, Wineskin works great for running some of the best GOG games out there, like the Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale games.

Sounds to me like he wants the ol' Macintosh equivalents of the DOS games
But if he wants the Mac binaries of the modern games or Boxer support he can look there:
http://www.gog.com/en/wishlist/site/add_mac_os_x_versions_of_games
http://www.gog.com/en/wishlist/site/mac_support
http://www.gog.com/en/wishlist/site/make_games_compatible_with_macintosh_systems
http://www.gog.com/en/wishlist/site/boxercompatible_dmg_files_for_mac_os_x

the issue with selling old macos games is the fact that modern macs use an much different os on an intel chip you would have to emulate an power pc running MacOS 9 and find an way to do it and not have apple sue them out of existence. they could do old dos games with dosbox and scumm but with dosobx they would need to build an steam like app to load the games and some mac users would not like having to play an 1991 ms-dos version that looks completely different from the mac port wolfenstine 3d is one where the macplay port was an much diffrent game from the pc/dos title ios users complained about the old dos graphics in the classic port id went and swaped in the hi-res interplay graphics on to the pc levels the only remaining pc art in the current title are the actors because only the pc had 6 sided sprites where the mac had cardboard cutouts.

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/osx_support/

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/mac_os_x_support_for_some_games/

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/mac_support_and_an_idea_how_to_do_it/

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/mac_support/

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/mac_compatibility_1/

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/mac_os_x_compatibility/

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/gog_games_on_mac/

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/mac_compatibility_for_dosbox_releases/

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/crossover_games_mac_osx_compatibility/

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/mac_compatibility_display_issues

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/mac_compatibility/

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/new_gog_is_just_more_of_the_same_mac_linux_compatibility_still_not_important_en/

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/gog_mac_client/

Once again thanks go to Wishbone and his tireless efforts to answer repetitive questions on the forums...

There's also my older thread which is here: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/gog_games_on_mac_os_x_a_how_to

Not so tireless (I'm falling asleep in my chair as I type this), and not much of an effort. As I'm sure I've mentioned earlier, I have these lists in text files on my desktop.

This one wasn't even supposed to be snarky. I just wanted to point him towards other threads where this has been discussed (to death) often enough before.

The System Shock list is always supposed to be snarky though.

I use Boxer for dos based games, Bootcamp via a Windows 7 partition or Parallels 7 for windows based games.

Thanks guys for the excellent answers - I knew that there had to be something wrong with my search-fu! :-)

Also thanks for the different WINE links, will have to try them out. I just like native (or semi-native, like the ones from Aspyr) better than VM'ed games, although I do use VMWare from time to time (currently with the Age of Decadence Demo).

I'd like to see GOG add the ability to tag ones account with an OS so these things can be settled in the future. At the moment I don't think that GOG has any way of knowing if there are enough Linux or OSX users to justify providing a convenient mechanism for installing on either platform.

As long as we're talking DOSBox or ScummVM games, the platform is pretty irrelevant. Zip files should suffice for both types of games, and would work on any platform. I'm a Windows user, but a Zip file would make it easier for me to install a game on, say, my phone.

However, this has been suggested time and again, and GOG has never seemed inclined to do anything about it. Also, as someone mentioned in another thread, the publishers may be against it, since a Zip file won't present you with the publisher's EULA when you open it. Of course, the EULA means fuck all, especially on GOG games, but the publishers seem to be pretty keen on them.