Since Castles II started selling again, all the abandonware sites removed it from their archives, redirecting towards GOG, which is good; however, you can only buy the CD version of Castles II, not the floppy one, which, as is widely known, has much more plot events in it. Thus I beg GOG to add the original Castles II as well, either as a bonus or in some other form.

As I said in the "Northern Campaign" thread, awesome! This is an excellent initiative.

I was wondering what the difference between the two versions was and couldn't find any info besides of what I already knew.

I played floppy C2 back in the day and the CD version now, but all I remember as differences is the historical castles info, the videos (which can be disabled) and the music; is there anything else?

Yeah, there is. Here's my understanding of the issue:

Because they had already decided to go with a single CD - and didn't really seriously consider adding another due to the cost of including a second CD at the time - there's actually much more actual gameplay and story content in the original 1992 floppy version. This is because the 1993 CD remake was jam-packed with large, primitively-compressed music and videos (though the compression was state-of-the-art for the time), and someone wasn't keeping track of how much space was available on the new CD.

Castles II already required 5-7 floppies (depending on platform) - so it was already a large game in 1992 - and the additional code that was needed to integrate and run the new music, videos, and educational materials only added to the size of the game. By the time they were finished, there was a bit too much content for one CD, and so they decided to cut what they perceived to be some not-completely-necessary game content so that they could eliminate a bit of code and [probably] at least one video while still preserving the bulk of the original game and the new content they had developed for the remake.

What we're left with, unfortunately, is a shorter game with a bunch of awesome new content but less actual gameplay available, and a bunch of cut content that people with the floppy release had always enjoyed.

I have to wonder if it's possible to patch the missing content back into the CD version of the game somehow.

That would be awesome. One would presume that there must be a way, but I haven't the foggiest. It would be a risk to take on though, as it would have an unknowable chance to become a very time-consuming project.

On the other hand, if just swapping andor adding a few files from the floppy version would be all that was needed, it could be worth a try. I just can't see myself taking the time to do that right now, not with so much other stuff I'm already not doing that I damn-well should be doing.

Sorry to insist, but what is that content difference? As I said, I played the floppy version (not that long ago for the last time), and I don't recall any gameplay, story or sidequest's differences and I'm having trouble finding any references to them online.

Standard 3.5" floppies are 1.44Mb. Seven of them represent a bit more than 1.5% of the (smallest of all) 650Mb CD-ROM; I don't see that as evidence of needing to eliminate anything. Let me check my backup HDD... uncompressed, C2 floppy is a bit less than 11.000.000 bytes, or 1.6% of a 650Mb CD.

--- edit ---
Math error :P

Yes, it was about 11MB of initial game data, much more than that to play the added CD content, and finally a ton of new CD content. That's why I've always assumed that there was probably "new" content cut as well. There's no reason to cut any of the initial game data otherwise - not unless some of the plot points demanded videos or something else that would have necessitated more memory on the CD.

But I've been playing the CD version for so long that I really can't remember what I'm missing, and I don't know that I would remember even if it was a very significant portion of the game, since I last played the floppy version a very long time ago. As far as where my understanding of the issue comes from, 10-20 years ago this was a topic of discussion, and I've posted everything I can remember piecing together in the late 90s. That's all the info I've got. I don't know of any remaining Castles sites where this info might be easily found. (Heck, even "Planet Deus Ex" is gone now - those forums were the best Deus Ex resource on the planet, and they were straight-up deleted.)

But I'm with you, I'd love to see a breakdown of the version differences, and I'd love to see someone do a comparison of the two versions. But that's only the start, really, because there were multiple regional releases - as is common - and I have no idea which of those versions I'm playing from GOG: US? UK? European version in English? And what, if any, are the differences between those? It's maddening.