Oh you don't even need to search for it. it's right there, smack dab on the first page in the support area. It's fine if it's temporarily off, just to see if it's indeed causing trouble but chances are that it'll stay off forever after that.

Most of the games (Sword of the Stars: The Pit for exampl) don't actually require admin permission, so it is perfectly fine to turn it off. Some of the games (Jagged Alliance 2) may require admin permissions, depending on where you install them. The v2.x installers do try to avoid system protected folders, but you can still install them there. A few of the games do require them, because the developers tend to not know proper coding practices (HKLM instead of HKCU keys for example). The "Run as Administrator" setting is usually the first troubleshooting step, so GOG has it already set to reduce the support tickets.

If you are aware of why the flag is not needed, feel free to remove it. If you have no clue about it, then you probably don't know why you should set it, so it's best if it's already set.

And a small nitpick, the limited user rights have been standard from 1993, with Windows NT, which did have support for per-user settings. But no, game developers still opted for system wide settings instead...


Edit: ChrisSD tells me that DOSBox proprely reads files stored in the VirtualStore folders, so DOSBox shouldn't care about admin rights.

The point, surely, is that GOG should know which games require admin rights, no? And from a security POV non-admin rights should be the default, no? Therefore admin rights should be on a per installer basis and GOG should know from their testing what rights are needed so gamers don't have to work it out for themselves.

Btw, dosbox games don't require admin rights if they are setup right.

Microsoft had the power to enforce rules but chose not to. So yeah, are developers to blame for this? Yes, sure. But MS is just as guilty.

It still does not give GoG a free pass if they indeed run everything with admin rights from the start.

If you have a DOSBox game installed in Program Files, does the game load the saves correctly? I know that they will be written in the virtualstore directory instead, question is if the game can properly read them. I know for example that JA2 can't read them properly, thus why I added it there.
And the "setup right" part is why I said it may need them, just like JA2.
What do you mean power to enforce the rules? If you code your program to use the settings in its own installation folder, regardless of which user runs it, that means you assume only one user will be using it, and he'll have write access to said folder. Windows NT worked under the assumption that multiple users will be using the same machine, and not everyone will have write access to the installation folder. Yet the game developers chose to ignore that, at least until Vista and UAC made their games not work. Or is this the enforcement you mean, making the games unplayable?

Also, this potentially keeps employees from installing GOG games on office computers. The joke being that many (if not most) GOG releases are from the previous century. :D

This is something that's bugged me too. I always go in and clean up after the installer (removing the 'run as admin' check). Which so far hasn't been needed on anything but classics.

By "setup right" I mean the installer not the game itself. But having looked into this I see that when I use the GOG installer to install Slipstream 5000 (a dosbox game) into program files it doesn't set it to use admin and it does work fine. I could save and load gameswithout any issues.

I'm not saying that no game needs admin permissions, some might. However most games, even old ones, don't. At most they may require changing some folder permissions but not much else. Also note that Steam, by default, uses the Program Files directory. If even they can manage it then I really don't think there should be much of a problem for everyone else.

Pretty much, that. Break stuff so it gets fixed. But hell, in the name of the mythical backwards compatibility they let the code monkeys run amok. And I'm not talking only about game developers, though, they're the relevant bunch for this discussion.

By the way, the default install path for a GoG release is still C:\Program Files. There is no reason to install stuff there by default.

Thank you. So it seems that while the saves will be put in VirtualStore, DOSBox is coded properly to retrieve them from there, unlike JA2. So let me amend my previous post.
I thought the v2.x installers defaulted to c:\GOG\Games, not %programfiles%. But they do keep the last one you entered. Let me remove said registry entry and check it.

And the reason to install in %programfiles% is to keep the program files in the relevant directory, which should be accessible by all users, even though they may not have write permission there. But yes, you can install in different directories as well, as long as you keep out of the Users directory, and the %systemroot% one. But that may end up messy, thus the reason programs are supposed to be installed in a centralized location.

Actually it isn't. The defualt is C:\GOG Games\ but it remebers the last folder you installed to and will use that next time. If you delete the following registry value it will revert to the default:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GOG.com\DefaultPackPath

You can delete it by either using regedit or opening up a command prompt as administrator (here's how) and typing the following:

reg DELETE HKLM\SOFTWARE\GOG.com /v DefaultPackPath

True. My bad.

Never mind on Win 8 you really can't. If you manage to turn it off fully, metro apps break. The slider doesn't really turn it off, you need to hack a registry entry.

Plus that the advice is probably mostly worthless anyway. I've never had a problem with a GoG game that was fixed by turning off UAC. Problems with multiprocessor and multiple video cards galore, but never UAC issues. The only related issue I've had was doubling of the file verification time if I forget "run as admin" on the installer.


The Post 2005 list is actually pretty decent. I'm not going to bother counting 'em though :-P

And almost anything from the previous century without a manifest (non-DosBox) will run fine without admin.