I am thinking about trying out windows 10, but I am worried about compatibility. Does gog.com have a list of games that are currently known to work or not work? With MS axing support for 16 bit applications in win7, I'm always worried about being burned again.

if it's 16 bit it's more likely to be compatible because you'd run it in dosbox.

as always, we have to wait and see. some things will probably break.

but this is why gog has been keen to move on from just old games.

I don't know of anywhere where gog has stated officially what's supported and what's not just yet. there is only so much they can do. they can't rewrite everything in assembly. mostly gog just configures existing stuff available as open source volunteer projects. they do some hacking themselves I think on some times, but they don't rely too heavily on that.

it's still wait and see at this point. if large swaths of ttheir catalog break, they'll surely do something. and I'm sure that eventually someone will make workarounds and gog will apply any that exist.

yeah good point. has gog ever stated why they don't use something like windows virtual pc more often?

Licensing of windows I'm sure.

yeah that is true. people have to install their own OS in the VM and probably there's no way gog could do that. from a legal point of view.

I guess there's always wine but that doesn't seem to be moving quickly.

The problems with wine are due to regressions and linux drivers. People change something in a dll reimplimintation to fix one program, and wind up breaking another. So you see that heroes of might and magic 3 had platinum compatibility in wine 1.4.3.blah, but crashes under the latest version. Then you can run into problems where it crashes with intel's and amd's drivers - but runs fine with nvidia. So your playing the lottery when you try to run a game under wine.

I've heard wine under windows is possible, but only in safe mode.

No offense to the wine team, they do a really good job. Its just I've given up on linux gaming. If you can afford a windows license, there really is no reason to use linux (edit) for gaming - the games are all closed source and non free, so ideologically it doesn't matter to me.

Edited - there is no reason to use linux for gaming

Also, I assumed GOG.com had access to the source code for at least some of the games. I'm not a visual c++ wizard, but I thought to use a later vc++ run time, you had to recompile the game against it.

never heard of gog.com having source access. I thought they just got gold builds from the publisher. or even tracked down a retail build themselves.

1. In most cases this is not the case. So much so that I don't know of a single game they do have the source code for.

2. GOG are not game developers. Even if they had the source code for a game, I doubt they'd know what to do with it.

I'm going to have to go over to stack exchange and ask how they might have gotten so many games off the vc++ 6.0 runtime!

Fantasy General and Pacific General source codes are owned by GOG (along with the games themselves). In addition, Airline Tycoon Deluxe and Conquest: Frontier Wars come with their source code as an extra.

Interesting. Have they done anything with any of them, do you know?

Not that I know of.

Owning a game does not automatically mean you have the source code.