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OS X Games

Good Old Games Adds Mac OS X Support 124

Posted by Soulskill from the now-i-can-play-games-and-be-hip-at-the-same-time dept.
SquarePixel writes "The nostalgic games seller Good Old Games has added Mac OS X support to its platform and a catalog of games to go with it. 'During its much-ballyhooed news-a-thon, GOG drew back the curtain on a new version of its service tailored to Macs, which brings with it 50 games (eight of which you receive free just for signing up) and some rather tempting deals. Speaking of, there's this insane 32-game pay-what-you-want Interplay special leading the charge in celebration of GOG's fourth anniversary.'" Unfortunately, Linux support doesn't seem to be in the cards just yet. On a list of requested site features, Linux support has gotten quite a few votes, but a GOG employee said, "Linux is a great platform, and we love how much passion you guys are showing for it here on our wishlist. ... If we're able to bring GOG.com games to Linux--and we're constantly evaluating ways that we can do this--we want to make sure that we're doing it the GOG.com way: simple, easy, and it 'just works.' I'm not telling you guys to give up hope--we know how much you want this--but what I am saying is that this is harder to support than it might seem initially, and we're not ready to move to support Linux officially just yet."
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Good Old Games Adds Mac OS X Support More

Good Old Games Adds Mac OS X Support

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  • Isn't it mostly dosbox ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cley Faye ( 1123605 ) on Friday October 19, 2012 @12:20PM (#41707037) Homepage
    I was under the impression that a lot of the old games are merely dos version packaged with dosbox. I know I use some game I got from GoG under linux, just unpacking it and launching it "by hand".
    Am I missing something? I don't see how hard it would be to just package the same thing with a linux version of dosbox...

    • Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by HaZardman27 ( 1521119 ) on Friday October 19, 2012 @12:28PM (#41707149)
      I think for a lot of the games that use DOSbox, it works great. However, now that we're over a decade into the 21st century, many games from 1998 - 2004 are considered classics and were not designed for DOS. Fortunately a lot of these games work pretty easily with WINE, but it of course would be nice for native Linux support. For the classic Bioware engine games (Baldur's Gate, Planescape, Icewind Dale...) there is a Linux client for GemRB, which is an open source community rewrite of the engine used for those games. You can purchase and download the GoG versions of those games, and load them up through GemRB (also works on Android!).

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Hatta ( 162192 )

        Dosbox is good enough that it can also run Win 3.1 quite well. Apparently it can also run Windows 95, but that's unsupported and I haven't tried it.

        • All well an good, but none of those games are designed for Windows 3.1. If you'll remember - in the Windows 3.1 days virtually no "real" games depended on Windows. Aside from basic things like card games and a few tetris clones and the like, you mostly exited out of Windows to play a game then booted back into Windows afterwards.

          It wasn't until Windows 95 came along that you had a significant number of games that actually required WIndows.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Hatta ( 162192 )

            That was common, but not universal. The top selling PC game of the 1990s, Myst, was released in 1993 and was Windows only. Even after Windows 95 was released, many Windows games could still be run on 3.x.

            • Yes there were a few games designed for Windows 3.1, but they were very few and even most of those got new versions done for win9x, like Myst.

              • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

                by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
                Comment removed based on user account deletion

                • Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ? (Score:4, Informative)

                  by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Friday October 19, 2012 @08:13PM (#41711523) Homepage Journal

                  Win 3.x used WinG for graphics and it was VERY primitive and crash prone, DirectX came out with Win95 and was head and shoulders better than WinG.

                  DirectX came out after Win95, and NT already had GL support and NT's software GL renderer would run on Win95.

                  Its just a shame that OpenGL dropped the ball and cared more about CAD compatibility and letting the GPU manufacturers use "shims" than they did about actually competing with DirectX

                  You know what's really a shame? That 3dfx made GLIDE instead of starting with MiniGL, which offered Microsoft an opportunity to make their own shitty 3D API instead of being strongly encouraged to go OpenGL, which they certainly could have done. And the rest is history.

                  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
                    • I don't know where to begin with this...

                      GLIDE stomped the living shit out of OpenGL and as far as I know there wasn't any "MiniGL" at the time

                      GLIDE was basically a hacked-up subset of OpenGL. MiniGL is the name given to the subset, without the GLIDE API weirdness - i.e. the subset of OpenGL that the VooDoo could support in hardware. It was used by games like GLQuake.

                      because even at that point in the game Kronos was dropping the ball when it came to OpenGL by focusing more on CAD than gaming

                      Kronos didn't exist until about a decade later. Back then there was the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, which was a fairly open process. Vendors proposed extensions in their own namespace (e.g. NV_), once two or more vendors supported the

                    • Literally everything you said in this comment is wrong. The sibling comment to the one I'm leaving now covers most of it. I want to address this though: "But I had both the Voodoo 2 and the Geforce 2 and frankly GLIDE just bitchslapped anything that OpenGL had put out" Frankly, you are beyond fucking ignorant here. I had both a VooDoo 2 and a Permedia 2 and the V2 was slightly faster than the Permedia 2 had dramatically better image quality. You just really have no idea what you're talking about here, but I

                    • Microsoft also had plans for a 3D card (Project Talisman, I worked for Silicon Engineering which was supposed to actually do much of the work under sub-subcontract) and they probably promised big game developers the eventual DirectX-Box, or "Xbox" as it came to be known.

                    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

                    • What the fuck is a permedia? Never heard of it

                      And that is why you should just shut the fuck up because you have no fucking idea what you're talking about. Ever heard of 3dlabs? No, of course you haven't.

                      But I'm sorry but while openGL was okay back in the day the bare metal design 3DFX used frankly just smoked it

                      That is so much bullshit I have no idea what to even say to you.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by AvitarX ( 172628 )

              Civilization II was Windows only, could run in 3.1 though.

            • Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ? (Score:4, Informative)

              by beelsebob ( 529313 ) on Friday October 19, 2012 @06:01PM (#41710441)

              Uh actually, it was released in 1993 for *Mac* only.

              • According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], it was released on September 24 1993 for Mac and PC. It's easy to think it was a Mac exclusive, reading that article, as it was programmed with Hypercard and Quicktime, on Quadras. I remember playing it at a friend's house (he actually had a CD-ROM drive), while I was a senior in high school (1993-1994) and his was a PC-only house.

                Those were the days when Mac was easiest to use to write multimedia software, best for Photoshop and barely used by home users.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Friday October 19, 2012 @12:48PM (#41707309) Journal

      No, you're not missing anything. Anyone who can run Dosbox can run GoG downloads with a small bit effort unpacking their archive.

      What would be great is if GoG would distribute some classic Mac games like Marathon or Escape Velocity. Or the 640x480 Mac version of Dark Forces. These games need to be more easily available.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by j-beda ( 85386 )

        Escape Velocity Nova seems to work on modern Macs:

        http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/ [ambrosiasw.com]

      • If I remember correctly the game engine for the marathon series has already been open sourced and ported to Linux, you can grab the sources code (and precompiled binaries for OSX and Windows) from bungi's websites and the game files are a free download from there along with numerous mods.Sso I'm not sure how much more easily available they could be as for the others I don't know.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        What would be great is if GoG would distribute some classic Mac games like Marathon or Escape Velocity. Or the 640x480 Mac version of Dark Forces. These games need to be more easily available.

        Marathon is available - Bungie released the engine as open source and it became Aleph One [bungie.org]. (I don't think bungie.org is the same as bungie.com, just a very popular fansite for all things Bungie, most popular of which is HBO).

        It's also available for iOS, done with Bungie's blessing back in the day (the base game is free

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • What set Marathon apart was the level of functionality. It had more functions with keybindings. Also, it had a story. Today, who cares? Play Halo, close enough. It doesn't have the soul, but nobody wants to read through pages of shit in a FPS any more.

      • Maybe you're already aware, but the Marathon trilogy is now available for the open source Aleph One engine, which is given a thumbs up by Bungie.

    • Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ? (Score:4, Informative)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 ) <me&brandywinehundred,org> on Friday October 19, 2012 @01:44PM (#41707907) Journal

      A list of games that work, and how:
      http://www.gog.com/en/mix/great_gog_games_that_works_on_linux [gog.com]

      A lot of Wine and open source ports/re implementation of the engines (was it icculus or something that did those?). Not just DOSbox.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sir_Sri ( 199544 )

        It's the same problem the eve guys had, the existing Linux emulation, translation layers and re-implementations are generally better than anything you can do on your own in a reasonable time frame, especially if, like GoG, you're talking about dozens or hundreds of games, so it's a 'we won't do it ourselves but we're not stopping you from using already working solutions' kinda thing.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by AvitarX ( 172628 )

          I really don't see it as a problem for games, especially older ones where performance is less likely to be an issue.
          games aren't going to suffer from being non native in quite the same way as an office app, having pretty much their own interface painted by the game engine.

          • It's a bit hit and miss. For example, I just finished Broken Sword 4 (released 2007, bought by me from GOG), on OS X with WINE. I use WineSkin, which lets you create .app wrappers for Windows programs and easily switch between different versions of WINE. With the latest versions of WINE (on a quad 2.2GHz i7) it is slow and laggy, the CPU is at 100%, and periodically the sound gets broken and you get loud noise from the speakers. With the Crossover games engine (also the open source version, also install

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by AvitarX ( 172628 )

              my computer is nearly 5 years old though, I really meant dx7 era games as working and the performance not mattering as much. Though jerking motion probably would happen no matter how much power you throw at it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by r1348 ( 2567295 )

      gog.com doesn't sell only old games, despite the name. They launched the OSX version of The Witcher 2 among others.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sir_Sri ( 199544 )

        That's because it's the same company that made the witcher and GoG. That was their first big new AAA sort of release. And thus far I think their only one.

        GoG is about good old games, but why give away 30% on your own title when you sell at least some copies through your own store?

      • Their official name isn't Good Old Games anymore, it's just GOG.com. They made the change when they started adding brand new DRM-free games like Legend of Grimrock to their catalog.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • even the most rabid Linux users I've talked to admit Windows makes a good gaming OS so why not just keep the install that came with the OEM and have a dual boot? Seems like a no brainer to me.

        I built my PC, you insensitive clod! I have a license for XP and I run an XP VM in vmware player, just upgraded to 5 and d3d support is noticeably better. (Something that was drawing incorrectly is Civ IV is now drawing correctly...) But I don't want to run XP32 on my six-core, 8GB RAM PC with a GT240. I imagine I'll have plenty of problems with early XP32-era games just due to my graphics drivers.

        Somehow I got the idea a long time ago that virtualization was going to allow me to run multiple operating syst

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Drinkypoo get a copy of Win 7 Home

            I am not giving Microsoft my money. XP came with a prior machine.

            Although why you'd want to even attempt to run games in a VM is beyond me

            I don't trust Microsoft to run on my bare metal. I don't want to reboot. I only have 80GB SSD and the rest HDD and it takes too long to boot XP from HDD, and there's no room for it on my SSD.

            BTW if you want a copy for your VM to laugh at Win 8 X64 is just $40 and it'll have the latest DirectX

            Since I don't run Windows on the bare metal, I am not interested in Windows 8. Windows XP runs fine in a VM.

            Now if you'll excuse me I feel like a little Torchlight 2 in Steam

            Fuck buying games for Windows, and fuck Steam twice. I still believe in First Sale law.

            • Comment removed based on user account deletion

              • Oh good lord step away from the keyboard? do you HONESTLY think you can resell ANY game with an online component anymore?

                Yes. I don't buy the ones that I can't. Don't be such a bitch.

                And why in the hell are you even playing PC games if you hate MSFT THAT damned much? just buy yourself a PS3 already

                I don't trust Microsoft. That's orthogonal to the issue of hate. Your reading comprehension is for shit.

                There is principles and there is zealotry, try not to let the former become the latter, its not good for you.

                There are people with principles and there are people without. Try not to become the latter, that's how we got EA.

                • Comment removed based on user account deletion

                  • And WTF does "trust" have to do with shit? You think MSFT is gonna sneak through your window and beat your ass?

                    Are you really this stupid, or are you just trolling?

                    So seriously dude just buy a console already although frankly even those are now having DLC and online tied to an account.

                    I'm just giving up on virtually all new games. I like old games, so this is a working solution for me. If you want to continue to fund the fucking-over of the games market, that's your prerogative, but fuck you.

                    like saying "I watch TV, but only masterpiece theater, and only when its English and only when its hosted by a certain host"...well fuck, you don't really watch TV then do ya?

                    Nope, I sure don't. Coincidentally, I only watch downloads and Netflix — actually watching TV is horrible, I don't get any OTA whatsoever, and I refuse to pay a recurring fee for non-a la carte, commercial-laden programming. And I only pay fo

  • Bundle (Score:5, Informative)

    by demonbug ( 309515 ) on Friday October 19, 2012 @12:20PM (#41707039) Journal

    The pay-what-you-want is actually only for 20 games, and you have to pay more than the average. The 32 games you get for $35. Just pointing that out, still a pretty good deal. Played Castles last night - exactly as I remembered it, incomprehensible. Might have to read the manual to remember how to get my idiots to actually start building; the music transported me directly back to 1991, though. Love that awesome midi sound.

    • Have those games been updated to run on 10.8?

      IIR, Apple got rid of some legacy graphics support that those games needed to run (256-color mode, Rosetta support). I'd hate to blow $32 and have a bunch of games that were unplayable and eating up drive space.

      • As usual, the summary is a bit misleading. The Mac support includes only 50 games none of which are part of the interplay "pay what you want" offering. The two announcements were conflated into one. The real Mac promo is here:
        Mac promo [gog.com]

      • Ooops, I've found the real announcement too:

        GOG.com goes Mac [gog.com]

      • Good question. If it works, I'm going to be buying Syndicate. Absolute classic game!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Halo1 ( 136547 )

        Have those games been updated to run on 10.8?

        In general, the games never ran and never will run directly under any version of Mac OS X (or even "classic" Mac OS), and hence do not have to be updated. The currently released games fall into four categories:

        • They are DOS/Windows games, but are supported by ScummVM [scummvm.org]. The GOG installer will install ScummVM to run them. Before you yell "those are not native Mac ports!", keep in mind that those games were originally basically a lot of sound, graphics and a script, bundled with a DOS-based script interpreter. S
      • The old games run in ScummVM or DOSBox, both of which use something newer (e.g. OpenGL) for the final pixels-on-the-screen bit of the emulation, so they don't depend on 256 colour modes. The main difference from the Windows version is that they now have Mac installers. I found it slightly irritating that I needed to use WINE to install a game that I was going to run with a native DOSBox or ScummVM, and this has now been fixed. A lot of the newer games also work with WINE, but they're probably not going t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hatta ( 162192 )

      Love that awesome midi sound.

      Does GoG configure Dosbox with Timidity, FluidSynth, or Munt? For good Midi sound on dosbox you either need a good software synthesizer like the above, or a real hardware midi synth plugged into your computer.

      Dosbox does emulate the OPL3 for Adlib/soundblaster compatible FM synth, which is still pretty sweet. IMO, the FM synth in Dosbox is better than some period OPL3 clones, but not as good as a real Yamaha OPL3.

      • It's worth tweaking the DOSBox configuration for any GOG game. They pick pretty conservative settings. I noticed some games were looking a bit worse than I'd expect and found that they're using the fastest scaling algorithm for point-and-click games. Switching to hq3x made the output a lot nicer.

  • Not actually "pay what you want" for all 32 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Red_Chaos1 ( 95148 ) on Friday October 19, 2012 @12:20PM (#41707047)

    If you want all 32 games you'll have to pay $34.99. Not bad at all, but not "pay what you want." Also seems to me that there were a lot more games from back in the day with the Interplay name on them, not just these 32.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      here's a starting point...
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Interplay_games

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's worth nothing that "pay what you want" doesn't include amounts above $2500.01 either.

    • No pay what you want is only 8 games.
      More than the average (currently 13.72) is 20 games
      and $34.99 is the full bundle.

    • Also seems to me that there were a lot more games from back in the day with the Interplay name on them, not just these 32.

      Interplay was also a publisher. Among other things, they published Blizzard's earlier games, such as The Lost Vikings and The Lost Vikings 2: Norse by Norsewest.

      The latter was on the Interplay 15th Anniversary collection in the 90s, but Interplay's then-new owners sold their publisher rights in 2001ish.

      There were also the various Star Trek games, whose license likely ended years ago.

  • No such thing as a Linux OS (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19, 2012 @12:50PM (#41707335)

    What people in the Linux community tend to forget is there is no such thing as the Linux operating system. There are dozens of operating systems based upon Linux, but there isn't any one Linux platform to target. If GOG rolls out support for, say, Ubuntu, they will have hundreds of Arch users still nagging them for support. If they support Red Hat, they leave Debian out in the cold. It's virtually impossible to support all Linux desktop distributions because there's no lowest common denominator and the various projects are in constant flux.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jedidiah ( 1196 )

      No.

      There is indeed a single Linux.

      There's just one X. One kernel. One SDL. Beyond that you might have a couple choices for things like sound or the desktop API.

      It's not quite as bad as or "fragmented" as some people like to make out.

      libvorbis is libvorbis regardless of what distro you're running.

      Packaging is different but that's something you can let individuals handle. Allow Debian or Redhat users the lattitude and they will make their own packages.

      Linux is no more in flux than any other desktop PC

      • What version of libc? What shell? Why do I need X to install a package... I'm a linux user! Is X running in a framebuffer or hardware accelerated? Do we only have MESA installed?

        Also, there is NOT only one kernel. Depending on what you are running, it may even be as drastic as 2.4.* vs 2.6.*.

        • Also, there is NOT only one kernel. Depending on what you are running, it may even be as drastic as 2.4.* vs 2.6.*.

          You mean 2.6.x.y vs 3.6.z right? :P I mean, that only spans the last 15 months...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by adri ( 173121 )

        Dude. Please go and speak to a game developer about the screwed up graphics driver nightmare under windows.

        Then realise that the same exists on Linux.

        A lot of effort goes into the Windows + (all the different versions of graphics drivers out there) nightmare. Linux would at _least_ be that kind of screwed up to maintain. That's a lot of manpower for no specific revenue targets. No PHB is going to agree to that.

        Now if Linux had a sane, stable graphics environment that provided the same experience on all plat

    • Actually the kernel pretty much IS the OS. A lot of distributions throw their own software packages atop that OS but they're all Linux. Same binary format and you can pretty much expect that they're all running an x.org server for graphics.

      Also - many programs already have binary Linux distributions that work on just about any target platform. You just use statically compiled libraries and for the most part you're good.

      Even then, if you want something that even depends on some things within a distributio

      • You just use statically compiled libraries and for the most part you're good.

        Until someone discovers a security vulnerability in zlib, libpng, libjpeg, or one of the other statically linked libraries.

        • Which would only affect people running that particular application while it was running. At that point it becomes a security issue with the game - not the library. They recompile and issue it along with their standard game patches.

  • Does It Include Breakout? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Does it include Breakout? Super Breakout? [youtube.com]

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • A lot of these games I've already been playing for years on the Mac via DOSBox. Only I'm running OSX 10.4 or 10.5 and GOG requires 10.6.8 or later. What are we paying for again?

    • Re:Already playing for years on the Mac via DOSBox (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MysteriousPreacher ( 702266 ) on Friday October 19, 2012 @01:44PM (#41707919) Journal

      Presumably these would be licensed copies of the games. That and the games packaged in a way that doesn't require torrenting and then fiddly set-up.

    • Two things:

      First, when you buy the game you get both the Windows and Mac versions, so if you are using an old and unsupported version of OS X then you can still use the Windows installer under WINE and then play the games under DOSBox or ScummVM.

      Second, you're paying for the Mac installer, that comes with DOSBox or ScummVM preconfigured. Several of the games I've already bought from GOG now have Mac versions, and if I want to play them again then I can just grab the Mac version next time, rather than hav

  • Maybe I'm confused but isn't OS X simply Apple's version of Linux? I realize this is a simplistic view but I don't see why they wouldn't be able to create a package for Linux.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No, it's BSD underneath, but these games are all compiled with Xcode, so it's using the native OS X libraries and API's for everything. While a large amount the architecture of the kernel and BSD subsystem is easily emulated or even mapped to compatible API's under Linux, the native labries would need to be emulated in a similar way to WINE.

  • Every bit of feedback I've ever sent them has gotten implemented. When first using the GOG downloader I sent them feedback that it's annoying I had to queue individual bonus content pieces one at a time. Few months later they updated and now you can add all bonus content for a game in one click. Later I gave the feedback that for any Dosbox based games they should have Mac versions. Lo and behold, today my purchase of Syndicate I can now download for Mac as well.

    GOG rules!

  • GOG drew back the curtain on a new version of its service tailored to Macs, which brings with it 50 games (eight of which you receive free just for signing up) and some rather tempting deals.

    . . . but unfortunately 49 of those games are variations of Tetris. The 50th one is that cool puzzle game with the Apple logo.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk8hxjpnUiw [youtube.com]

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