I guess it's just a manual protection? Meaning you need the game manual to look up some answers, not that the protection works by hand :-P

Of the games I own here it's the same with the Leisure Suit Larry series, but GOG provides all the manuals and handouts. I actually like it, because it takes me back to the time when my collection of games consisted of my boxes of floppy disks and my folder with photocopies of manuals and copy protections and whatnot. (Yes, sorry, I was a pirate at that time... :-( I'm trying to make up for that now.)

Regarding min specs, besides what omega64 says (GOG using their test machines as min specs), take into account that all these games are emulated now. So the specs for emulation are way higher than the original specs, and also I'm quite sure that none of the original developers/publishers will be around to give specs for emulation.

Llalalalala I'm not listening!
The Amiga is the home computer of the Gods, bow before it!

Because it uses DosBox to emulate an old dos machine. And to emulate old systems it needs some horsepower, it's not like virtual machines which can directly take advantage of actual hardware by bypassing the host OS. And as already said, it's more safe for developers and publishers to raise the requirements instead of getting in trouble if something is not working because of other stuff running in the background, as example thanks to virus scanners.

Of course DosBox does not really demand such high requirements, I could run most games in dosbox with my old subnotebook with 1,2 Ghz low-power processor and my old desktop with an AMD Athlon XP 2500 single core processor. But I also remember that my AMD processor showed some performance problems with some more demanding games from the last days of dos the era (around 96 and 97). So yeah, better be safe than sorry ;-)

Congrats for doing that step ;-) There were some threads in the main forum about joystick recommendations over the years and the Thrustmaster was always highly recommended. Personally I will wait until september/october, the last two months I already spent too much on tech and gaming stuff and I hope that maybe the price will get a little bit down or there is a good deal somewhere.

Just followed the trouble shooting guide that support sent me and the game now works fine. The "identify the squadron insignia " copy protection shows up but is disabled. .....Just have to hit return. So yes there is no copy protection. The only step I did not preform recommended by support was to disable full screen in the dos box configuration. If you are having the problem I did just use the GOG support section since they will ask for a dxdiag from you. Since everyone's PC's are different they can tailor the trouble shooting to your specific PC.

J

thanks for the reply.
the games are emulated ? that would explain the high requirements, ifrom the minute i ran some games i had thought about games being emulated in away cause some of them use lots op cpu aswell.

Anyway, the 1 of 2gh is no that bad but > 2.67 quadcore as a minimum is a no buy for me, cause i want to be able to play as much games on recommended, been playing too many games for far to many years at minimum :D

Yes, they are emulated unless you have a 90's DOS machine. I actually have a Pentium Windows 95 machine here in a box in my room, and I am tempted to try some GOG games in it, but you know what the biggest problem is for that? I have no easy way to copy stuff into the damn thing :-D

It has no USB and no network card, so my choices are floppy, tape (yes, 250 MB backup tapes!), or CD-ROM. I would have to rescue a laptop I have in another box to burn games to CD, then see if the GOG versions will run in that machine.

Game works for me now as well.
Today's patch seemed to fix copy protection trouble.

I'm off to hunt Richthofen bros.

sometimes i wish i ahd plent room to keep a old win2 amchine and winxp this way i can run lots of direct x 7 games, gorky 17 looks a lot better with and older gpu, cause now it looks like shit using the software rendering, res. eveil 2 and 3 wont run because of the gpu .... back then i had a voodoo 3 (or 300) and it worked a charm, ah those good old gaming days are gone for good.... the sad thing is older games seem to have 'licence' problems, so we mostly get new games, while imho the old stuf looks better then 99% of the new games.

The weird thing is that gamersgate has some nice old games drm free and most even work, if GG can have them drm free, why cant GoG have these aswell ? Seems the game devs/publishers are favoring some distributors i guess, we all know steam will always get the first batch of good games, later with luck the gamepublishers might consider to offer them here aswell, says something about the attitude of these gamepublishers/gamedevs :D

game looks good.

But it certainly was!!! ...at around 1986-1989 or so, after which PCs (and arguably also Sega Genesis/Megadrive, Super Nintendo etc., if you were into consoles) mostly surpassed it, even if here and there Amiga still shined like some parallax scrolling 2D graphics things. :)

I mean, come on! When Wing Commander (1990) appeared on PC, you knew it was "Game over Amiga, game over!", even if Amiga got an inferior version of it two years later.

Personally I don't mind it because that form of "DRM" (a manual keyword check) is nowadays quite useless when a digital copy of the manual is included with the game.

The whole idea of the keyword checks was that for common people it was hard or impossible to photocopy the whole manual (and the copy would become worse and worse with each new copy), and if you wanted to provide pirated copy online (on a pirate BBS or whatever), the best you could do was to provide some kind of text file with the game. Good luck trying to describe all those insignias in a text file.

Nowadays that keyword check is not really any kind of DRM anymore, as it doesn't curb you from making million copies of the game and each of them being fully playable, just like the purchased copy.

At worst, it can be considered a slight nuisance, an extra step, having to check the digital manual to bypass the check. I personally consider the need to recalibrate your flightstick and having to select your graphics and sound card in the beginning of each KotS play session maybe even a bigger nuisance, but oh well, man's gotta do what women and children can't.

Anyway if I understood it right, the GOG version now bypasses even that small nuisance now.

That it is actually a form of DRM is debatable since it does not manage the "rights", but barely requires the user ( irrespective of him/her being the licence holder or not) to have the manual or a bonus material provided with the game ( some may remember checking Aerodork timetables before playing with Larry, or decoding pirate codes with a dial-a-pirate before playing Monkey Island ).

And if it is one it's the mildest one, since it was not affecting the game code or the media anyhow. Thus such in game checks do not limit the rights of the legitimate licence holder ( no risk of the drm code being incompatible with a newer OS or with another software, no dependance on a distant server, no ties to the media, no limittation to the number of backups, no limitation to activations ). I don't even think GOG should remove them, as they ere part of the experience and it's possible to provide as a bonus a "list" of codes to be used.

Some of the other early copy protection mechanisms were worse (PC booter : you were bound to use the original media ; disk "stamp" : you needed the original disk 1 ) as they did not allow for backups to be used and tied the user's rights to the limited lifetime of the original media. And I can guarantee you that being barred from playing with one's favourite game (after years of use) because of a defective disk is infuriating.

In my opinion it does (try to), by deliberately making it harder or impossible to play the game without the said manual. Semantics schemantics.

But in modern times it is made inefficient since you get a scanned copy of the manual with the game, so now it is just a mere nuisance, not really a way to prevent illegitimate copies from working. That's good enough for me, the scanned manual is a fully working workaround for the "DRM".

This is indeed a form of copy protection, but I don't get your argument. Everyone who had a legitimate copy of the game had a copy of the manual because it would be in the box, so this can't possibly make it harder to play the game. In modern times we have pdfs instead, that's the only difference. Imo the only valid reason to be against it is its annoyance (for example, in the original Pool of Radiance you have to type a word from a given page and line every few times you save the game). At the same time there are several valid reasons to keep this copy protection intact. Personally I'd prefer to keep it the way it was in the original.

Not sure if you read quite right what I wrote. See the important part: without the manual. Since the illegitimate copies didn't have that manual, it was harder or impossible to play them. I didn't say that the legitimate copies were harder to play with the manual, unless one refers to the nuisance of having to look for the keywords or codes from the manual when running the game.

I'd rather not call manual checks "copy protection" because that is not what they are doing, preventing you from making copies of your gaming media. Quite the opposite in fact, the point of those manual keyword checks was that no copy protection would be needed and you can make backups (copies) of your original game disks, in case the originals got broken or something. So it would be odd to call that form of DRM as "copy protection".

Copy protection is exactly what it says: some way to prevent you from making working copies of your original gaming media.

I was saying pretty much the same. I don't mind manual keyword checks that much in GOG games, it is merely a nuisance anymore, not something that will prevent me playing the game in case I lose my only paper manual (because I can easily make million copies of that pdf manual).