Posted December 26, 2012
Very relevant: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/why_does_gog_have_simcity_2000_yet_no_simcity_2000_network_edition
I do not know how necessary this thread is, and it may upset some people. However, I've noticed many reviews complaining about how this is the DOS version of the game and not the Windows 95 ("Gold"/Network Edition) one, and I figured I'd give my own take on that. (This is what I've gathered from my time on the GOG forums.)
GOG is focused on games that just /work/. As far as I know they do their best to test games on about 35-40 different machines and will not release each one until it runs well on every single one.
Windows versions of games were ?hardcoded? to run specifically with 16-bit processors, and therefore are generally unstable on machines that have 32 and 64-bit processors, certainly the norm today. There are workarounds for the Windows version mentioned on this forum, but they appear to be quite complex; plus, what might work for one person might not work for another.
On the other hand, thanks to the DOSBox team (who helped to develop a stable product that acts as a fully-capable DOS environment), DOS versions can be played by the majority of people without having to fiddle around too much or deal with complex workarounds. It's certainly not a perfect solution (sometimes people have to tweak the sound and graphic settings in a configuration file), but when put up against the crashes of a Win95 version, hopefully one can understand why GOG did what they did.
Until we can get something like a "WINBox" that emulates old Windows environments (I guess Wine For Windows is working on something like that), DOSBox is the next best alternative. I'm certainly not saying you can't steer people away from GOG's version (if you can find a better version legally, like on eBay), but I hope this post helps people to understand GOG's reasoning in the matter - they're trying to make games run as easy as possible for people.
Oh, and just FYI: as far as I know GOG never gets the source code for games, so they can't change things internally. Most games work via other methods.
(By the way, does anybody have any eBay or Amazon links to Windows 95 copies of Simcity 2000? Feel free to post them here.)
I do not know how necessary this thread is, and it may upset some people. However, I've noticed many reviews complaining about how this is the DOS version of the game and not the Windows 95 ("Gold"/Network Edition) one, and I figured I'd give my own take on that. (This is what I've gathered from my time on the GOG forums.)
GOG is focused on games that just /work/. As far as I know they do their best to test games on about 35-40 different machines and will not release each one until it runs well on every single one.
Windows versions of games were ?hardcoded? to run specifically with 16-bit processors, and therefore are generally unstable on machines that have 32 and 64-bit processors, certainly the norm today. There are workarounds for the Windows version mentioned on this forum, but they appear to be quite complex; plus, what might work for one person might not work for another.
On the other hand, thanks to the DOSBox team (who helped to develop a stable product that acts as a fully-capable DOS environment), DOS versions can be played by the majority of people without having to fiddle around too much or deal with complex workarounds. It's certainly not a perfect solution (sometimes people have to tweak the sound and graphic settings in a configuration file), but when put up against the crashes of a Win95 version, hopefully one can understand why GOG did what they did.
Until we can get something like a "WINBox" that emulates old Windows environments (I guess Wine For Windows is working on something like that), DOSBox is the next best alternative. I'm certainly not saying you can't steer people away from GOG's version (if you can find a better version legally, like on eBay), but I hope this post helps people to understand GOG's reasoning in the matter - they're trying to make games run as easy as possible for people.
Oh, and just FYI: as far as I know GOG never gets the source code for games, so they can't change things internally. Most games work via other methods.
(By the way, does anybody have any eBay or Amazon links to Windows 95 copies of Simcity 2000? Feel free to post them here.)
Post edited December 26, 2012 by tfishell