GOG is run by pretty amazing people , for example, they recently announced that they were interested by regional pricing[1] when people made it clear they were not pleased by this change, they changed their mind[2]. Impressive.
Also, it'll be interesting to see if it's a plan to bring more indie/kickstarter, since most of them have linux version planned, so GOG was not ideal.
This might be tougher than it seems. Several years ago, I tried to run the Alpha Centauri demo on a recent Fedora system (I think probably 6 or 7), and it wasn't able to start; it did run fine on FreeBSD in linux emulation though. (sorry no details)
Somewhat OT, but I've actually had really fantastic luck running older Windows titles under Wine, even when those same titles won't work under Windows Vista or later. I've actually found it substantially more work to get the Linux port of Tribes 2 (from Loki) working under a modern distro than to simply run the Windows version under Wine. Gosh I wish the Tribes franchise got more attention in those days, but I think the learning curve didn't exactly help.
I really like what Loki did. It's a shame they were too early to market.
In the long term I suspect the best option for SMAC is a binary reverse-engineer and re-implement. The original game has a number of bugs ( http://www.civgaming.net/smac/acad_buglist.shtml ) and isn't even a very good Windows port (it uses a crazy 16-colour video mode that really doesn't like alt-tab).
Or we could run a kickstarter to open source it ..
It'd be nice to have improved support from GOG for linux. The PlayOnLinux project has a decent list of Gog.com games that it'll help install and run on Linux platforms. But I'd buy a lot more games from them if I didn't have to rely on that or manually trying to get games to work.
Only problem will be having more games to distract me, I went with Linux to avoid needing the willpower to not play games and get on with learning / working ;-)
I know that many "Linux gamers" scoff at the prospect of official support for running games under Wine... I don't. I think GOG in particular should jump at the chance to partner with the PlayOnLinux project and some the numerous other projects that allow older games (and some new games) to run via some emulation layer, engine rewrite, or reimplementation of Windows library/runtime support. Judging from what I have seen Wine do these days (which is by far the most fickle of methods above), I would not be surprised if a year of work or so could get %90+ of the GOG library running with near perfect quality on GNU/Linux systems. As a point of reference, running the recent Valve ports for GNU/Linux are consistently less stable than running under Wine (which works nearly perfectly) and that is without any kind of PlayOnLinux configuration script magic.
Note that there is no reason that I can see that this wouldn't simultaneously make the same software available for OS X and any other system that can run Wine.
> I went with Linux to avoid needing the willpower to not play games and get on with learning / working ;-)
GOG is a good platform. They don't always have the cheapest offer (not even for "their" games, Witcher 1 und 2), but they have a good mission, being DRM free. And it was about time there was a good place for buying the classics, computer games are old enough for that now (so older games are not automatically too old to enjoy if you didn't grow up with them).
And think about the perspective. 2 years ago, there was nothing if you wanted to reliably play games on linux, apart from the few old games released for that OS and the few good FOSS-indie games. Wine is nice, but not reliable. Now there is the humble bundle, there is Steam, and there is also GOG - three good options, two of them without DRM, all of them not expensive.
It starts to become viable to get rid of Windows even if you are a gamer (I'll probably wait for League of Legends and Planetside 2 though, but only because I have Windows 7 already installed. If that breaks, why bother?).
Well, running the old LucasArts adventures would be easy with ScummVM integrated, but I wonder if they can secure the rights. A promising sign is that Tim Schafer (made a lot of the early adventures) recently went to LucasArts on a mysterious mission (perhaps just a tour!).
It's doable. I have it working on my Mac with a Flightstick Pro. I've never had sound issues, though (it plays through my Roland SC-55mkII and sounds great).
Finally! While I like GOG, other distributors like Steam, humble bundle and desura have Linux support, so I've bought games from them instead. I'm glad GOG decided they want my business again.
The interesting tidbit being: "We're initially going to be launching our Linux support on GOG.com with the full GOG.com treatment for Ubuntu and Mint."
That's the insignificant part. There are already a bunch of places to buy Linux games, what's one more? Here's the interesting bit:
> This is, of course, going to include games that we sell which already have Linux clients, but we'll also be bringing Linux gamers a variety of classics that are, for the first time, officially supported and maintained by a storefront like ours.
Even if this is via e.g. dosemu, it'd still be offering something new compared to storefronts that already have Linux support.
There's a whole load of games from GOG that you can already play on linux, be it throuhg the PlayOnLinux project or by using Dosbox.
However, there are a lot of games where it feels like they should work on linux, but they just don't. For instance, Interstate76 runs fine in PlayOnLinux, but Interstate82 doesn't. There are probably a bunch of those games where the GOG team is in a position to make it work under linux whereas we users alone can't.
I'm excited. Even if they'll just push the games that already run through PlayOnLinux, official support and the publicity are both worth it.
> There's a whole load of games from GOG that you can already play on linux, be it throuhg the PlayOnLinux project or by using Dosbox.
Yeah but for those that have no native linux clients that's not an officially supported way to play them, neither from GOG nor from other retailers.
The reason it matters is not for people like the typical HN user but for, say, my dad which is now using a linux laptop and plays some GOG games on it from "his past" but isn't technical enough to know how to fix it when there is a slight unimportant mis-configuration. If I wasn't there, he wouldn't be able to.
I'd still recommend PlayOnLinux for him (or rather for you to install on his laptop), since POL takes care of a lot of things for you, among which there are the different versions of Wine.
Game only works on a particular version of Wine? No problem, POL will install that specific Wine version for this game without any adverse effect on the other games.
It's nice to see Mint acknowledged. Ubuntu stuff usually runs fine, but official support is a plus compared to the usual attitude of letting the user sort it out.
So that customers who don't want to have to mess with emulators can just buy a game and play it?
That's one of the primary reasons to use GOG - even the ancient games they sell (in my experience) Just Work. They would be far, far less successful if every customer had to become an expert in DOSBOX in order to play an impulse buy of a game from their youth.
Also, it'll be interesting to see if it's a plan to bring more indie/kickstarter, since most of them have linux version planned, so GOG was not ideal.
[1] You can read all their reasons here: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/letter_from_the_md_about_re... Yep, that's 5 pages of answer from staff members.
[2] http://www.gog.com/news/getting_back_to_our_roots