MrBoat: Hello, I've been out of linux for quite some time, I was getting back now to just find that... some games don't have tarballs on the new interface?!
Can someone clear me this?
I'm on a RPM distro, and I can't understand the reason to force us the .deb package when, until now I had the option to pick between .deb and tar.gz.
If they're the LucasArts games, then that's because one of the terms of getting them on GOG was including a Windows-style forced EULA dialog and you need something capable of forcing scripts to be run on install to attempt that.
Just unpack the .deb in your archiving tool of choice:
* file-roller will show you the contents you want directly
* ark will show you the literal contents of the .deb and you need to open data.tar.* (could be .gz or .xz)
* at the command line, you can run `ar x game.deb` and then `tar xaf data.tar.*`
Once you've unpacked it, you'll notice that the file contains the "/opt/GOG Games/GameName" structure and, inside that, a perfectly ordinary start.sh like in a .tar.gz release.
(GOG already struggles to keep up with the demands on their time so they use the same mechanisms for all their games and In games which offer both a .tar.gz and a .deb release, the .deb just calls an undocumented "start.sh --install-deb" option to do the heavy lifting. Even better, they made --install-deb general enough that, as long as you remember to use "--uninstall" instead of "--uninstall-deb" (which just calls dpkg), you can use "--install-deb" to install system-wide from a .tar.gz as if you'd installed a .deb.)
That's how I installed my LucasArts games into my system-wide ScummVM instance without the hassle of manually installing, cannibalizing, and then uninstalling the .deb files. I just opened them in file-roller and extracted the specific files listed as required by the ScummVM wiki.
(Well, aside from the games where I own them on CD-ROM. It's still quicker and easier to pull my MIDI keyboard out of the way and reach for the correct end-label in my CD shelf than to redownload them over a 5Mbit connection or look through 400+ DVD+Rs on spindles for the correct backup copy.)