Your testing was much appreciated. I've bought the game now... and I can't get it to run in 4:3. Given that I'm a stickler for correct aspect ratios I'm plenty experienced in the normal hurdles.

This one has me stumped though, did you have to do anything special to get it in 4:3?

I've tried both 1440x1080 and 1280x960 and in both cases it seems to ignore my "maintain aspect ratio" video settings. I've tried both of those resolutions outside of the game and they come out the correct aspect ratio. Pretty strange. Hopefully Gualbert will have a suggestion.

Hi, do you have any ideas about the above problem? The game seems to ignore my aspect ratio settings, so even if I pick a 4:3 resolution it comes out stretched to 16:9 anyway.

No, I just changed the resolution and after clicking back the screen (including the menu) immediately goes to 4:3. Make sure that you have set the scaling option in your graphics driver to not interfere with this because of the scaling option though. If it is set to "fullscreen" instead of "keep aspect ratio" it will always stretch the screen the moment you are not using the same aspect ratio as your screen.

I said it before but maybe it was overseen because of my long list.

There's still a bug in the German localisation. Could you please check the subtitle I posted in the attached screeenshot? It's a line that is said whenever something is not working but the subtitles do not match the spoken words here at all. Maybe those were mixed with another line I did not encounter yet.

As I said, the game seems to bypass/ignore that setting somehow. I checked various resolutions outside of the game and they maintain their aspect ratio fine, but when I try them in the game it remains stretched. I've never seen anything quite like it (and I have spent a lot of time getting aspect ratios right on other games.

It's definitely not a problem with my screen, it handles 4:3 fine in everything apart from this specific game. It's really strange, it as if the game somehow bypasses my settings.
An in-game 4:3 option would be very welcome though.

Me too, I have a lot of savegames from the nineties :-)
You should tell them what the spoken words say and if they match the situation, they probably aren't German speakers.

I still find that very off-putting and another reason not to buy it without double-checking that the system requirements list Galaxy as optional and then borrowing a non-networked Windows PC to test on so I can get a refund on technical grounds if it refuses to play without online connectivity.

None of the other GOG games in my ~1600-strong collection ask about that... they just pretend Galaxy doesn't exist unless launched BY Galaxy... y'know, like Steam builds that don't use Steamworks DRM.

(Plus, if I were to buy it to run in Wine, every weird, non-standard quirk is one more thing that could trip over something in the Win32 API that Wine hasn't implemented yet.)

Thanks for the quick reply, i know ... games dont use many resources yet my pc shows they do, so itehr my pc is showing high values while they should be low, i cant check that cause the PC is not a human. and pc cannot lie if i see x number i assume it is correct, anyway thats why i buy games very cheap nowadays to avoid asking a refund if the game doesnt perform , bought 9 games at steam ( summersale) at 7.99 euro, normally it would be 39 euros :D
now the games are less that 1 euro, so if one or more fry my cpu, i will just uninstall the games and hide them on the shelves.
Anyway i stopped buying games at listprice, and wait fot huge sales ... cause i dont want to bother anyone cause they all reply my PC should be able to run it, but i havent messed up my pc... although the replies i got in the past always suggested the pc can run it, so i must have done something to the pc making it unable to run :D

Thank you. Yes, I am aware that they probably don't speak any German. I suspect that they simply used the wrong audio files in this case. I doubt that they will be able to fix it without anybody speaking English even if I would translate the spoken words more or less. I will revisit this and also see what the English version says in this case. I guess I will collect as many information as possible about this issue comparing German and English and post everything to the contact adress I was shown earlier.

Edit: Just saw that Gualbert already replied and that they will take a look.

You don't need to buy and refund. I will test this for you.

Edit:
Done. For testing purposes I deactivated every Galaxy service AND deactivated my internet connection. I started the game and it showed a message that it could not find the GOG user showing my account name. However I was able to input any name in the field and click on continue. Game started fine. I changed some options and quit the game and restarted it again (still disconnected) the message appeared again and I could chose the username I entered the first time by chosing it from the dropdown list and clicked on continue. The game started fine with all the options already in place I changed the first time.

So it is absolutely working offline and without Galaxy but it is an inconvenience that the "error message" even occurs. At least it should have saved the fact that I started the game the first time with a non Galaxy user and instead of still searhing for a Gaalxy user it should have automatically started with the last user not showing any message at all.

Just FYI if you have a non ancient CPU (no offense intended here - my own CPU is pretty old being an i5-444) no game could ever "fry" your CPU. High CPU usage is nothing that has to be bad in general, depending on how powerful your CPU is it might be normal that the usage is pretty high - however whenever a CPU is getting too hot there are several built in security features in every "non ancient" CPU which will simply slow down your CPU or - if this does not help - power down the PC completely before anything is happening therefore preventing any damage. I am using PCs since they exist (my first one was an 8086 somewhere in the 80s) and not a single time a CPU burned through for me (I guess I had at least 8 or 9) even though those old CPUs were missing the mentioned security features. Today it is nearly impossible to destroy the CPU. Of course it is still up to you to not want the CPU to getting such an high usage at all so again - I just want to explain, inform and help and not critizise your behaviour in any way. :)

No

There's no reason to move any DLL even if you don't use Galaxy at all. The problem the game has (as stated above) is that it will always TRY to search for the Galaxy user to make it easier to those that use it. Unfortunately the same thing makes it harder for those who don't. So yes, they probably should change this. They could as well search the registry to get the Galaxy username and if none is there they could as well use the username of the PC which is stored in the registry as well. No need to use any Galaxy related function at all.

It has nothing to do with this game not being online. I explained above that the game is perfectly running without any online connection at all.

If you like you can then enter any name you want into the field and click on continue.

Could you explain? Except for the very slow transition when you try to reload a certain safefile there is not much to the ingame menu at all which basically is nothing more than some very few options which can all easily be checked or clicked.

Yes, I already posted this as well. The game menu and splash screen is set to a 16:9 resolution. Whenever you use a different one game menu is set to the same aspect ratio making it look awful and amateurish. The game itself however is scaling fine.

I attached pics with said resolution. Cannot see any pixelation (make sure to have the advanced checkbox checked to not run the classic mode). Yes, the low resolutions (640x480/800x600) do look blurry but imo 1024x768 is looking all right - of course resolution is still quite low so it might depend on the monitor and its native resolution how blurry it will look in th end. Does it look worse for you?