I'm curious how the gold box D&D games work on modern systems. Have there been updates for compatibility? I have the originals and installed them all not too long ago and tried to play under DOSBOX but there were a number of glitches that made it really difficult and not very fun.

Well, a huge aspect of GOG's business model is based around getting older games to run smoothly on modern systems. So it's a good bet these run fine.

That's the entire point of Gog.com :)

I was hoping to appeal to the gog.com gods to bring back the AD&D Masterpiece Collection. It had menzoberanzan, plus a ton of other good games, including:

Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager, Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession, Ravenloft: Stone Prophet, Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse

I really loved Strahd's possession and the stone prophet :)

Well I was hoping for some official word on the matter.

On another note, is it possible to run these games via dosbox on a tablet? The turn-based gameplay seems like it would work perfectly on a mobile device.

Pool of Radiance runs fine on my Win 8.1 system. Haven't tried others yet. However, my laptop does have a dedicated number pad and Home/End keys (used for menu selections); some people with laptops with no dedicated number pad have reported difficulty in remapping around those keys.

Some of the games require a keyboard to play, while others occasionally need a keyboard at specific times. For instance, Dungeon Hack requires a keyboard to name your character and to pass the copy protection.

The free Hacker's Keyboard Android app works all right for input, it imitates a PC keyboard. I've had to use it for certain PC-ported apps before that didn't respond correctly to the standard Google keyboard.

Thanks for the tip. Yeah, I was noticing how cumbersome the keyboard commands were as I tried out Pool of Radiance. Absolutely zero mouse support so far...

And that code wheel - the horror! I think I'll get out my originals, as it's so much easier than finding them on the PDF.

Why get the code wheel? You can get if you want to waste your time. The DRM is not there anymore, just press enter.

Some people should play the actual thing before complaining.

And also, all those games run just fine on Win8.1, Win10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Just as well as the orignal, original bugs included :) Pool of Radiance still crashes on occasions when you roll criticals, just like the original, save often. :)

As for mouse support in Pool of Radiance, you can't support something that most PC user did not even own (or could afford) when the game was released back in 1988. A mouse was an Apple user snob luxury fad back then.

Oh, I did not read that you could bypass the code. That's nice and will save some time - thanks! But why did they include the code wheel then? Very odd.

I had a mouse on my 8088 that I first played this on, but that wasn't until 1990. Side note: I remember leaving the PC running for quite a while in one of the kobold battles because it would take 10-15 minutes for the monsters to take all their turns moving and attacking in one huge battle.

I thought some of the later games had mouse support, but I haven't gotten so far as to try them all yet.

One other note: character creation and customization is SO tedious. I didn't even remember it being so bad. Makes me want to dig up my disks with the save games rather than go through that whole process again. But where's the fun in that?

Thanks for the tips.

I think the wheel is just a heirloom for nostalgia. I remember not entering the right code a few times before managing to actually get in the game ... it was SOOOOO tedious.

You'll be happy that the game runs MUCH faster than it was back then and GOG did a kick ass job with dosbox slowing the game down and making it work. I strongly suspect GOG inhouse custom code because I never managed to get it working properly with any dosbox version, ever.