Hi folks,
I've been a bit of a lurker for a while, and am fairly new to most games, but I have just started getting into a couple of genres, especially the city-builders and classic RPGs. So, a lot to learn. Pardon my noobness. ;-)

My question: is there a way of knowing whether the versions available on GOG have the lastest patches or not?

I'm finding it a bit confusing, especially since GOG usually seems to run different version numbers than the community websites for the various games. Even on the forums, helpful though a lot of the posts are, it often seems a convoluted process matching up old posts with old downloads.

Is there a way to tell if the installed version from GOG is the latest patched code or not? Or is it just a matter of installing the patches on a game-by-game basis and seeing what it does to the game?

I'm wary of breaking any customisation done by GOG, or overwriting other patches GOG's applied that I may not have downloaded yet. Or is it best just to leave well enough alone?

Grateful for any advice.

If it's an older game, it already has the latest official patch applied.
If it's a newer game, take a look at the game's subforum. There may be a slight delay for the patch to arrive at GOG, but it's usually slight.
Then there's Omerta...

As a rule GOG installers always rock the latest official patch released, unless the game is still getting patched of course.

I totally agree on the strange GOG version numbering though. It is confusing and really only refers to the installer, which is uninformative as it gets.

edit: and of course J is faster as usual. :)

Except for "I Have No Mouth" which still doesn't have the ScummVM version that it does on Steam...

I wasn't aware that emulation was official patch.
Yes, Steam does use ScummVM while GOG uses DOSBox, but the game itself is patched to the latest official version. Whether the benefits of using ScummVM instead of DOSBox are worth updating is something I don't know, and I haven't followed the discussions that closely.

The vanilla DOSBox emulation has bugs and issues which were in the game after official support ended, SVM emulation fixes them, so yeah it's pretty important, and it's literally been months since the update happened on Steam.
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/SAGA/Bugs#I_Have_No_Mouth.2C_and_I_Must_Scream

I do recall a lot of complaints about the ScummVM version as well though, including jittery mouse, problems with screen display, there's even a game breaking bug with Ellen. And I can't see any "Game breaking bugs" fixed in the page you linked. Not to mention the comments in the announcement of the engine change.

Still, the latest official patch is applied to IHNMAIMS, even if the latest emulation isn't used.

As a general rule games on GOG are always patched to the latest version, otherwise it would be pretty slack of them to be a digital service and expect us to patch the games we buy.

Don't know about P?C, but the Baldur's Gate series is patched to the latest official patch.

Well, I wasn't meaning to suggest any slackness on GOG's part! ;-)

Maybe it's not always clear (to me, at least) what's an official patch and what's a recommended modification that's generally believed to aid playabiility. Some of them, I realise, are modification of the game to make it function better on a modern OS; well, I'm running Windows 7, so I figure I'm pretty squarely in the sights of the work GOG does to make the games stable in current environments. That's why I don't want to mess up any of GOG's modifications.

But with other mods and patches ... unless you're familiar with the game, it's hard to know what is needed and what is not.