I don't care much how long it would take to either reverse-engineer or create a new downloader from scratch. As long as it eventually gets done, I'd be happy.

Just wanted to say(even if you are ignoring my posts as you said) that I commend you for doing even this......it likely will help a good number of people, and is at least someone doing something to help those who need or might want such.

Agreed somewhat on this bit as well....I see it with games and such all the time.

==========================================

Some people(not just him) are just afraid or seemingly distrustful of anything third party, and on the flip side some are distrustful of anything "official".

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Sounds good and well said

SORRY, i don't want be asshole , but your work now is kind of counterproductive. i will explain -

GOG need realize that what they did is WRONG.
but they will NOT, IF few more people will stay here and KEEP buying (because they say "hey there is option"),
Situation just need to be escalated little bit, you know...

When enough people will be pissed off and stop buying, they will most probably change it back faster.

Steam can have DRM free games too, and at least they provide option to developers release games as DRM free too

There is not so much reasons left, why GOG is still special/better then "others",

like If they do C++ Library client <10MB (imagine GOG DOWNLOADER + full table of all your owned games library - so you don't even need open browser!!) and then OPTIONAL SEPARATED module (225MB+) (you know, that browser based bloatware) for all that other BS -> social /Store /Voice/CHAT with separated module (CALL it GALAXY 3 (FREE :D ) (or even best way it will be if they separate all to smaller modules)

then, all will be happy and GOG will restore their image.

IMO GOG changing it back it about as likely as pigs flying...that said: Timboli is actually helping people out, which is to be commended NOT derided or chastised.

I mean GOG(as I said) is very unlikely to change it back....would you rather in that case that people had no extra help/alternatives and no one helped anyone in such ways?

I've not downloaded a game in a while and just tried and no downloader links!

This is crazy to me. Right now I have very fast internet so its not a big problem but last year I was so reliant on gog downloader to enable me to download relatively large files - sometimes it would take me days. I feel terrible for people who have bad internet and don't want to use that gog steam-clone client thing. Such a shame.

He is essentially trying to carve a tunnel through a mountain with a pickaxe while someone else is using explosives/etc to carve a tunnel through said mountain for others to use.

Many customers have made mods for games/programs/etc over the years to add features and new things to old things......without them we'd have much less fan content if we went the "only companies should make things customers want or expect" route as he seems to want.

Sometimes I wonder if all you people are unable to read. Timboli explained one thing very clearly and nobody seems to notice it.

"My program is not a replacement, not at all, as it doesn't download. You have to do that yourself using the browser links, with or without a third party downloader. "

So for those that see the main problem in the fact that downloading without downloader will now be more complicated it won't help at all. It is meant to help those who are afraid that their download might get corrupted when downloading through a browser. So no, it is not as if the community already solved the "problem" and therefore there would not be any need to do so from GOG - that is absolutely not the case and so there is no reason to point out that Timboli's solution might be counterproductive at all. Most people want an easy and save to use downloader and Timboli's tool is only a help for the "safe" part - not for the "download" part of the problem. As much as I applaud each and every one of the community who has tried and is trying to make this a better place by investing their time and skills to fix what GOG has broken over the time - at least for a part of the community - in this case it is of no help for me ... but for those who saw the main problem in not getting their download checked when using the browser.

Thanks for the support.

I would add, that GOG should quite frankly be embarrassed that we are having to do work-arounds. They haven't done us any favors.

So see what I have done as a constant reminder of their lack of consideration to good customers ... those who have supported them for years. What a way to treat us.

I've actually just done an update to my program (all voluntary work for nothing, except the joy of helping others ... and myself). Not uploaded yet, because I am chasing down an Edit control bug, for a visual element. The update has some other nice features, including now recognizing and accepting 7Z and RAR files. GOG's latest freebie had one 7-Zip file in it ... which seems crazy to me, because not everyone has 7-Zip installed.

I am also considering adding support for checking the integrity of PDF files and image files, as my recollection says that sometimes in the past they haven't been zipped.

Something else worth considering about my program, is that it can have uses beyond GOG files, especially if I add PDF and JPG etc in for integrity checking. As it is ZIP, 7Z and RAR and any InnoSetup EXE can be tested.

LET GOG KNOW HOW YOU FEEL BY VOTING
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/keep_the_gog_downloader_and_keep_it_up_to_date

I see the number is now 489. Keep it up good folk.

500 votes for the return of the GOG Downloader, is pretty significant, and not far off now.
That's half a thousand votes, for those with their head stuck in the sand, and who are trying to sabotage our reasonable request.

I wonder how many votes will it take to get them to consider changing their mind. 490 when I checked right now. Btw out of curiosity, I looked up various GOGmix wishes since that was another great feature removed for no apparent reason. The wish to "Bring back the ability to start/edit a GOGmix", is at 139. So while I wish there were greater numbers for that, it's interesting that Downloader is significant to a few hundred more users, and counting.

Gogmix what is that?

I finally spent some time, searching the web high and low to get some info on SH files and how to check them in Windows. I did not really have any luck, but I like to think outside the box .... so I had some promising results on my own.

I seem to have had some success in testing SH (Linux) files in Windows.

It involved a bit of experimentation, where I renamed the file extension until something worked.
That something, was using '.gzip' as the extension. That allowed me to look inside the file using 7-Zip, with the 'Open archive -> #' option. Inside were 3 entries.
a file called '1', which was a few Kbs.
a file called '2.gz' which was nearly 1 Mb compressed and inside a 1.5 Mb file called '2', a Unix file.
a file called '3.zip' which contained 3 folders, inside which existed many other folders and files.

That '3.zip' file in this instance was 187 Mb (compressed), and about 291 Mb uncompressed, and contained 1579 files.

That discovered and established, I then tried to get 7-Zip to play nice with the command-line, but no luck. This was trying various zip extensions as well as the original '.sh'.

However, if I opened the file directly, it just showed the zip content and I could even extract it, though there was a message about the file not being 'gzip' but 'zip' instead. Even so, it would not work when the extension renamed to '.zip'. I suspect this is to do with the mixed content in the SH based file, and perhaps because '.gz' comes first it opens, but then only processes the '.zip' file portion because the content of the '2.gz' is a unix file.

Looking through the command-line options for 7-Zip, I tried a couple that might be helpful, and eventually hit on '-tzip', and that worked with the original file extension of '.sh'. The '-t' tells 7-Zip to consider the file type as the text 'zip' that followed.

So in my earlier BAT file commands that I posted, you can use the following for a SH file.

"%~dp0\7za.exe" t -tzip %1 >"%~dp0\Results.txt"

and you can also use the following to get the content listed.

"%~dp0\7za.exe" l -tzip %1 >>"%~dp0\Results.txt"

I now use both in my program, one after the other, for an SH file.

I don't claim this is perfect, as I doubt the '1' or '2.gz' files are tested. But the rest is tested I guess, as a zip file, and something is better than nothing. Of course, some here would know more about that than I do.

I will upload the new version of my program soon.

494. Half a dozen more people and we reach 500 wishlist votes!

Very nice Timoli, kudos for being curious and exploring the possibilites. I would like to present important information about SH files.

For starters the extension .SH refers to shell scripts, which are common in *nix. They aren't archives themselves, they just contain plain text information which can be parsed by shells like bash (bourne again shell).

What GOG does is a neat trick/hack, they use 2 tools to embed an archive inside the script itself (which is possible thanks to the capabilities of the bash shell).

The two tools are:
1. Makeself - https://makeself.io/
2. MojoSetup - https://www.icculus.org/mojosetup/

The first tool (Makeself) is responsible for making a shell script which has an archive embedded inside it (in the form of a variable), and upon execution it call the appropriate program to extract the embedded archive. The second tool (MojoSetup) is the actual GUI installer that is also embedded as an executable program in the shell script (similar to the data archive). Combine both of these and you have a neat and self-contained "installer".

Makeself itself offers commands which are available on all generated self-extract archives, one of the commands is `--check` which can verify the integrity of the embedded archive. I used this to test the integrity of my Witcher 2 installer:

```
> ./the_witcher_2_assassins_of_kings_enhanced_edition_en_release_3_20150306204412_20992.sh --check
Verifying archive integrity... MD5 checksums are OK. All good.
```

You can also use the --help command to find out that these tools were used to create the script: `Makeself version 2.2.0 combined with MojoSetup`

In any case, since we cannot natively execute shell scripts in Windows, we will have to make do with 7-zip as it is pretty resiliant with filtering the script data (which to 7-zip as far it is concerned, junk data). It does have quirks, like how it won't properly work if the file has the .ZIP extension, so using the `-tzip` command switch forces it to process the file as a ZIP archive. Do note that `-tzip` is not universal, and it will fail for archives not using the ZIP format.

Mmmm I am trying to understand why you did not tell me all of this before? But thanks.

We have had no shortage of conversations about this in private.

Not talking about the Shell Script element, which you have explained to me before.