Is anybody aware of any particular reason why every single DOS game on GOG is not available in Linux version (since the DOSBOX is for Linux) as well? Wrapping these classics to the exe installer makes it not natively installable on Linux, however, game files would work with no problem in Linux using DOSBOX.

I'm not sure. It may be a publisher decision.

"Technical or legal matters" has been the official GOG answer in the past. Don't know if anything has changed since then.

Noticing patterns from companies like Activision, Bethesda and Ubisoft, I'd assume that they are just not interested in Mac or Linux, and thus don't give GOG the legal greenlight to create Mac/Linux installers.

To whatever end, nothing stops you from extracting the installers and slapping together your own wrapper.

Besides, the Dosbox that GOG ships is awful and moribund.

Publishers usually get rights for a particular OS and mostly it's just licenses to redistribute the game for Windows. That's why many DOS games only come with a Windows installer although there is no technical limitation to run them on an OS that DOSBox supports.

I think the problem isn't that it can't be done, but rather that it requires extracting stuff from an executable that is meant for another operating system.

If there was simply a zip file available, I don't think too many people would complain.


As such, the problem isn't even limited to Linux or Mac.
If I want to use my own DOSbox or ScummVM installation on Windows, I still have to either unnecessarily install the game normally, or use some third party extraction program to get the files that I need to get the games running.

It's not a big problem, but simply offering an OS-neutral zip file would help people regardless of the computer they are using.

While true, Innoextract is a pretty easy command line tool, but licensing and publishing rights are a sham.

Could be library related.

Not long ago took a few older games, made configs and got them running. Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego, XF5700, Inner Space, Tyrian 2000, etc. While they worked beautifully on the laptop, then transferring them to my linux chromebook and it failed to start at all. Though on my Lakka they again ran fine (when i got it to load that is, setting up exact starting scripts with no keyboard is fun...). Maybe the DosBox i used wasn't configured, or had to not be in a GUI xwindows environment. Or maybe it didn't like the S3 video card between systems...

It could just be they are a fickle to configure. While Windows DosBox more or less runs out of the box.

Regardless, innoextract can work, or if you get the old dos install disks you can manually mount the drive/cd and install it (takes literally seconds) and only change a couple things like how many cycles it likes or making sure the sound card settings work. Be playing your games in no time... (Maybe, probably...)