Why? Who knows? Laziness? Lack of interest in actually supporting Linux? Currently 65/117 of my gog dosbox games are shipped as Windows-only, so it's not exactly a rare occurrence. I run all of my gog dosbox games with my system dosbox, even the ones that come with Linux installers. My system dosbox is 0.74 with patches to support glide, munt/mt32, and addkey (which I use on some games to auto-select menu items).

I usually just go ahead and use wine to run the gog installer before moving the game into my dosbox games dir, but you can use innoextract to extract directly (not sure any more if you have to use the current git or if the last published version supports the version used by gog; I always use the git version myself).

Once extracted, I delete the included dosbox, and use the *single.conf dosbox config mostly directly. You can use your default config with the smaller *single.conf using "dosbox -user-conf -conf <file>". Sometimes important settings are in the main config file (without _single), so diffing that with your own main config may help. The scripts and procedures I use are somewhat documented on my game support page.

For me, for MM1-MM5:

I use munt/mt32 emulation on games that support it. This involves copying (or soft-linking, as I do) the MT32 ROM files into the game dir and adding And of course configuring the game itself to use mt32 (e.g. running install.exe).

mm1: (gog also sets memsize=32, but I don't) mm2: (gog also sets memsize=32, but I don't) mm3: mt32 (gog also sets memsize=32, but I don't) mm4-5 (aka Worlds of Xeen): mt32; requires editing of GAME1.INST GAME2.INST paths for Linux path names Swords of Xeen: mt32, (use config from woxeen since there is no config program)