I don't want to derail the discussion, or fuel the fire for the "login is DRM" crowds, but even so, you can't download anything from GOG without an account. Not even freeware games.

In other words you need to have an account to play those games, even if you don't need to be logged in while you are playing. Also, in order to have an account, you also need to have an email account.

So in order to play a single DRM-free freeware game, you need to have at least two different accounts in two different services. It is quite different from having a floppy disk or an optical disc that can be inserted into a drive.

Of course once you have done that, and backed up your DRM-free copy, it's a different story.


You can use Tomb Raider Automated Fix fan patch which turns the game into a Windows game.

https://github.com/Carlmundo/TombRaider-AutomatedFix

(I just skimmed but I don't think this has been mentioned yet.) Props to GOG for their response on Twitter. I know people will call it hypocritical given that we have DRM'd single-player content here, but we should applaud them for when they publicly stand up for DRM-free and push in that direction. (Or we can just rage and wail at everything forever and ever /s ;)

https://twitter.com/GOGcom/status/1747335663995818251

Ah, but you can!

I mean, you've got to give the fans some credit for attempting to preserve these old games though new means, even if some of them (lookin at you, OpenC2E) get lost in the minute details.

I'd say it's not a problem with the gaes, but with the player mentality.
It's not just MS DOS itself, it's also the hardware. Try to run a modern sound card with SB16 DOS drivers ...

PS2 players keep their PS2 in order to play their PS2 games.
Amiga players keep their Amiga in order to play their Amiga games.
So do Megadrive players, Atari, whoever.

It's only us PC players who expect that ancient games run on modern hardware and software.

The easiest solution would be to do it like the console players and keep our old computers. Problem solved.

Luckily modern PCs can emulate old hardware very well.
So as long a game does not require you to connect to a external server, you can be pretty sure that there is a way to get it to run on any modern hardware (and software)

I actually have a PS2 in very good condition.

I actually have an Amiga in very good condition.

I actually have a bunch of old computers, even a couple of 5,25" floppy drives in excellent working condition.
But that's beside the point.

One of the reasons why we choose to be PC players is that we can have at least some kind of guarantees of backwards and even forwards compatibility, which console players rarely have. Okay, PS2 plays PS1 games, GBA plays GB and GBC games and so on, but nothing compared to PCs.
Not to mention all kinds of modding and tweaking, which may or may not be related to making games run on specific kind of hardware, or something else to enhance the gaming experience.

Running older games on a new computer is an integral part of the whole computer gaming thing, going as far back as Commodore 128 which was able to run software of three different computers, most notably Commodore 64, obviously. When Amiga became a thing, it could emulate Commodore 64 and some IBM compatible PCs.

So I think it's quite reasonable to think that new computers can run older games, as that has been the case for the last 40 years or so. The bigger problem is how some new stuff, like new Windows versions, is breaking some backwards compatibility on purpose, by introducing new APIs/layers/whatever, and getting rid of the old ones.

Amiga, XBox Classic, XBox 360, PS2,PS3, PS4 here :)

The Amiga 1200 also emulated a Mac with the same processor running at the same speed and was 20% faster running Mac software than the Mac was :)

The 7 tone music on the Amiga was actually based on a Atari ST emulation of the Amiga hardware.

So yeah, Emulation has always been a thing.

And luckily our processors still have the old commands to run software (but thanks to Emulation they don't have to).

Windows has the best backward compatibility - without emulation - of all operating systtems. There is none
that does it better.
They hardly ever break any compatibility. As long as a dev follows the official guidelines, these programs can run for a decade without problems.

The biggest Windows issue was, when Windows Vista and Windows 7 introduced an additional hardware layer and locked direct hardware access (let's face it: Windows 95/98 was a ticking time bomb, totally unsecure). Most blue screens occured because of bad kernel drivers and illegal access to the hardware. Microsoft put an end to that.


But Microsoft was wise enough to implement compatibility settings. Most users who whine about "Windows 11 won't run my game!!!!" didn't bother to check these before complaining.


The bottom line is: We expect that games run on new hardware, because we are used to it and it works remarkably well. No other system does it as good as Windows PCs do.
Sure, there are problems here and then, but all can be solved by using different drivers or driver emulation (or for programmers to just follow the f***ing guidelines by Microsoft instead of doing their own thing which is desinted to not work on future versions).

Yep, and that is why it is also irrelevant. You don't need an online account nor an email address to "play" (or even install) the game, but you need them for the purchase and delivery of the game.

It is a bit like saying that if you order to buy a physical game from an online store, you need to have an address to where that game is delivered, and you also need a postal system which will deliver it to you. It would still be ludicrous to suggest that you need a post office and a delivery address to play the game. You don't.

So yeah, like I've said million times in the past, purchasing and delivery of the game (or movie, or whatever) is irrelevant, when discussing about DRM.

It still has nothing to do whether the game is "digital" or "physical", as the author suggested.

Even if you could buy a physical version of Alan Wake 2 on optical discs, it wouldn't be any more "preservable", probably even less so than the current digital-only version as it would have both the online requirement anyway, and physical copy protection.

E.g. DOSBox works for that purpose. (Tomb Raider 2 was a Windows game though I think, only the first TR was a MS-DOS game.)

Anyway, that is irrelevant to the discussion whether physical games can somehow be "preserved", while digital games allegedly can't. Whether you can play an old game on newer systems is a separate discussion.

The Linux kernel is also particularly good at backwards compatibility. You can take pretty much any i386 or x86_64 distribution, put it in a container, and as long as it doesn't use a.out binaries (a *very* ancient thing in the Linux world; even if you started using Linux in the 90s your first distribution probably used ELF, and I don't think any games were commercially released for a.out systems) or newer kernel features (in which case the problem isn't backward compatibility), you can just put that older distribution in a container, and it will run.

So, if your Linux game doesn't run on a modern system, you can fix that by putting it into a container running a distribution that it's known to work with, and the game should run, provided the container has the required access. (You'll need graphivs access, as well as GPU access if the game is recent enough to need it; you can disable network access if you're worried about security.

(On the other hand, Mac OS is terrible when it comes to backwards compatibility. I'm pretty sure there's no way to run apps compiled for the Power PC architecture on a modern Mac, unless there's some third-party emulation available. You can't even run i386 software on modern Intel macs!)

Is that a new system that Microsoft announced?

I still find it confusing that Microsoft muddled the waters by releasing a (then) new console called the Xbox One, when that terminology was previously used to refer to the first Xbox. Then again, this is the same company that had the confusing naming of the Xbox One X/S later, and I hear the Xbox Series S/X are also different.

Sony's consoles, at least if you exclude the Vita, have the most sensible naming scheme. The consoles have numbers at the end of their name, higher numbers are more recent (and hence more powerful) consoles, and 1 hasn't been used, allowing it to refer to the original PlayStation without issues.

Nintendo's portable consoles also did that sort of thing:
* I believe the GBA still uses the GBC's sound chip for some of its sounds. It can make 8-bit sounds just like the GBC (see Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance for a game that does this for most of its soundtrack), while also having at least one more modern sound channel.
* The DS's sound hardware, I believe, the same CPU that the GBA used as its main CPU. This allowed the DS to run a GBA game just by shutting off the main CPU and running everything on the "audio" CPU.

These days, it seems quite common for board games to have expansions, which are basically DLC. (Though, of course, they tend to be physical rather than digital.)

In fact, with table top RPGs, this sort of thing has been done since near the beginning. Just look at all the supplements that have been made for D&D *alone*, and you'll see that.

Also, collectible card games (like Magic: The Gathering) are basically gacha in physical form. You buy a booster pack without knowing what's in it, and just hope to get that card you need for your deck. (And there's the fact that many formats rotate out old cards, so the card that you spent lots of money on in the secondhand market is no longer legal.)

I would say that digital distribution basically replaced real scarcity (physical copies being in finite supply) with artificial scarcity (DRM that prevents copies from working).

On the other hand, DRM (often called "copy protection") is old; I believe it predates the distribution of games on floppy disks.

Now if only someone could get mouse support built in/added on somehow :|
(currently I am using a keymapper app to allow mouse use in-game, but it's not the best solution)

I guess how preservable such games(physical copies) would be would rely somewhat on the
technical skills of gamers....i..e their ability to preserve/archive for their own personal use.

No, you already said what it was about :)
They had the brilliant idea to call one of the new systems "XBox", so "Classic" is the new unofficial name of the old one.

Backward compatibility woudl be to do thatt without containers or Virtual Machines.



I think we can agree on that the best way of preserving old games are emulators.
Gotta start up my Evercade now and play some (officially licenced) NES or arcade games :D

I could, however, say that the Linux kernel is backwards compatible as far as userspace is concerned (and with the a.out exception, but you're unlikely to find an a.out binary in the wild); the only issues of backwards compatibility involve userspace.

Worth noting that containers don't have any performance overhead the way VMs do; the only cost is the extra RAM and disk space needed by the contained system.

Yes and no. You are missing out on a very crucial key detail.

DRM-Free digital games are a best way to preserve the games you have managed to purchase, before they get delisted, due to easier patch management and not being bound to hardware.

If you did NOT manage to buy it in time, then post-delisting you are fecked, DRM or no DRM. This is where the benefit of physical comes in. We are legally allowed to trade our physical games. I have purchased many used games over the years, that have long been out of print, which include classic GTA and NOLF trilogy.

DRM-Free digital games are as close as we can get to ownership digitally, but they are still inferior to physical game in terms of rights that they provide to consumers. We are not allowed to trade digital games. I want to play old TellTale games, but they are all bound to digital platforms and not for sale... So much for preservation.

Sure, if you throw law and EULAs out the window, then digital still wins, but I am arguing from the context of what's legal. The reason the video game foundation argues that 87% of games are lost is because they cannot be purchased legitimately any more, not because of their medium. The end of printing is not a big deal with physical games. Delistings, however, is a catastrophe for digital games and GOG is not immune to them.

Game preservation is about game availability to all, not just the select few who had opportunity to purchase early.