Windows 8/10/11 i think you can't disable windows update easily. Win7 isn't so hard.

No i'm not blaming Windows Update to changing your Galaxy settings, just in recent editions Windows updates, your settings seem to sometimes (or all the time?) reset to the (microsoft preferred) defaults...

That's strange. We have this happen at work with our software with some win10/11 setups, that it reverts back to default state (clean install), wiping the user database clear. It happens after big win update, as rtcvb32 said.

Since you are on win7 just like me on this pc, I really dunno what could reset your settings in galaxy in such way. If one updated from some very old galaxy build (like the very old galaxy 1.xx) to 2.xx, then I guess it would overwrite some uncommon settings... or if you have Galaxy installed in the programfiles folder, or some other system protected folder. Other than that, no idea really.

Galaxy user settings themselves are located in /user/appdata/local/gog.com/galaxy/configuration/config.json while the temp/cache/logs/cloud/etc files iirc are in root/programdata/gog.com/galaxy/

Maybe it's about user/admin privileges to these folders/files, galaxy itself or windows restore to previous version. Or the strange updating at launch happens to you too, that I've experienced today for the first time. Pretty weird one too. It freaked me out tbh, since one time I've updated a game blindly (no changelog to this day) and it turned out the game got a new owner (chinese) who censored some assets (because Taiwan doesn't exist in their world). Gog support told me that the old version is unsupported and won't be available anymore. Auto-updates and limited/no rollback is just a no-go for me.

People should stay away from laptops. They can be such a drain if you want at least some flexibility

Being able to play an 11 year old game at 720P on a brand new laptop. They must've changed the meaning of the word "cool" again...

Just head up if you game on windows 11 and love Bishock you should back up the original version now, The remaster has a Save fail error that seems to have no solution. The original version works fine on windows 11.

DRM-free shops should precisely protect us from that. And in a way, it does - if you make and keep your backups. I still have the original "dust ball" Chuchel, but I don't have the original ending of Portal or Mass Effect 3.

Same goes with movies (with some luck and effort you can still find the DVDs of un-enhanced Star Wars and non-redux Apocalypse Now).

What can peeve me greatly, is when you buy an older game now, that used to work on the back then current version of Windows, but now no longer does, only having support for more recent version(s) of Windows.

They often espouse things about preservation, but true preservation also means original.

When you buy a game from GOG, you should have access to an original working version (no DRM), as well as the latest DRM-Free version that supports current version of Windows. That's true preservation.

I'm not surprised. The remasters of Bioshock 1-2 have always been a 'hot mess'. Before they came to GOG, both B1 & 2 Remasters ratings on Steam dropped all the way down to "Mostly Negative" at one point due to save-game corruption, additional bugs added (random crashes, crashes if the map was activated, etc) introduced during the UE2 -> UE3 port that went abandoned by the devs for over a year. I've never really had any problem with the originals though, even with the old pre-GOG Humble Store B1 DRM-Free build that came in a zip file.

In my experience of having 2x PC's (1x W10 and the other still on W7 + Linux Mint), most games do continue to work on older OS's until you start recompiling them for client integration (eg, Fallout NV's XP compatibility broke because of Galaxy). Fine for Galaxy but it isn't needed in the offline installer version that can't even use them anyway. Everytime this gets mentioned, out comes the usual "But GOG only supports old games on new OS's" responses. In practice though, that depends on the platform and there's quite a few examples where "Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 & 18.04" are supported but not 20.04 or 22.04 (ie, the equivalent of GOG supporting Vista, W7 & W8 but not W10-11 in 2022...) So "we only support new OS's, not old ones" is very much a mixed bag. Same with the unnecessary removal of original DOS files because of ScummVM integration, there was really nothing gained there vs leaving the files in for those who want DOSBox / FreeDOS support, as they take up mere kilobytes and ScummVM ignores them anyway. I think people are more accepting of older OS incompatibility when it's genuinely because "it's too old", but not for artificial reasons.

I'm sure in cases like Doom 3 it's because of the publisher not wanting to for whatever reason. This makes me hope CDPR will be smarter and offer The Witcher 3's original version as an extra, like they do with Bioshock and others. We shall see though. I wouldn't get riled up day one either way, give 'em time.
I replayed BS1 a year or so ago and went back and forth. The original version is way more f'd up on modern systems. Horrible mouse acceleration and deadzones, gross UI, no FOV options other than super small or super large. The remaster has a couple quirks but was a ten times better experience. The issues you mention were all patched I believe.

Agreed, though this seems to be more dependent on the publisher/developer. When Beamdog moved to 64-bit versions of their IE games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale) the previous 32-bit version was retained as an extra (though not actually updated) so still available to new purchasers.

However this seems to be the exception - in too many cases a "new" version can end up inferior (or even unusable) due to OS/hardware requirements (the most gratuitous example is Hearthlands which since version 1.2 came with the 64-bit Java Runtime Environment, but calls it with the -Xmx1024m parameter limiting memory usage to 1GB - removing any benefit of a 64-bit OS).

There are a few cases where genuine improvements have been made (e.g. Titanquest) but even then, there is a cost in lost compatibility with previous mods, so having access to previous versions is still highly desirable.

Yeah, indeed.

Original files should always be available as extras, much more usable than some avatar images.
And I have wondered this many times, and I still do, they could easily offer other platforms like Amiga as extras as well, with a disclaimer that they provide no support for that. But they don't.

Now in some cases it's probably because there are complicated issues with IPs and copyrights, but that can't be the problem for every game out there.

When has Star Wars been released as the original version?
And I'm not talking about any Episode IV re-edit, I'm talking about the original 1977 Star Wars.

If such a thing actually exists, I'm going to hunt it down and buy it.
But the closest thing I have is a LaserDisc rip with bad image quality.

Right, and that makes no sense.

But there's also some customer responsibility here.
If we quietly accept that, then they keep doing that.

But the case with Blade Runner and its "enhanced" edition shows that sometimes complaining about things can actually make a difference. So perhaps with all those unavailable original games we should complain about the issue, politely of course, and in some cases that might make a difference.

The obvious exceptions to this are many cases where the creator of remaster/remake has no control over the original game, which is unfortunate, but that isn't the case with every game.

Never.
The title of the first video release had already been altered to match that 'big plan', that George led us to believe existed from the beginning (it was all bullsh**, but Fans loved the idea and took it for granted).

You talked about a laserdisk rip ... a rip of what exactly? What was the master?

Before the SE, a remastered THX edition hit the VHS market, later it was also released on Blu-Ray.
That would be the best option for purists, but I think it's really impossible to get the first cinema version of the movie.

Not completely true... ;) https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77

That also should be more of a problem with stuff that was done before the initial GOG release, but anything that was released on GOG should be a lot easier to offer as unsupported extras whenever a free update would end up raising the minimum system requirements.

Meh, the teaser shows "episode iv k" ...
I would very much like to see if they use the original scrolling text or the one with Episode IV in it.