both games installed on my windows 8.1 system and ran great.

nvidia 780 user here.

I know the steam version are harder to get running on modern systems.

Okay, I heard back from GOG support:

"Hello, we don't want to reveal all of our secrets, but no fanmade patches were used, the games are patched to the last official versions. We performed extensive compatibility tests and haven't experienced any problems with this game on any of our Windows testbeds."

So, Red Faction 1 definitely doesn't use Pure Faction. No idea what Red Faction 2 uses. Guess I'll just have to buy it and take a look.

Rampancy gets the solution as he stated the lack of Pure Faction, which GOG have confirmed.

Although I'd highly recommend you getting PF if you're interested in multi. I actually played some matches again just now. Had a blast playing on some old favorite community maps again. :)

Yeah, I played Red Faction 1 a year or two ago, and I had to use Pure Faction to get it running on my Vista x64 machine. Would definitely look to be using it with the GOG version, but as I've played through RF1 it is more the second game I'm interested in playing, but it'll be nice to have both on GOG, especially at 70% off.

RF 1 fails to work on my XP SP 3. I tried to get into game via PureFaction thing but really weird things happen on single player. Elevators wont work, events do not happen (for example at the beginning worker does not attack guard, just waits there, cutscenes do not enter) and you can not play. Weird.

I just played RF1 on my Win7 x64 with nVidia GTS250 without any issues.

I always wonder how GOG gets these old games to work (especially older DOS games)...I have to think they run on some kind of background code that GOG puts into the game. So my computer is running that coded program, which in turn is running the game.

But I'm not a tech guy, so I will just sit back and enjoy the games :)

Getting older DOS games running is actually quite easy, what with DOSBox as an emulator. It is the old Windows games that tend to be difficult, in particular those from around the Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 era, as 16-bit applications don't work on 64-bit Windows. But that said, there are some games that just suffer lots of issues on modern machines and Red Faction was one of them until the fan-made Pure Faction patch was built. However, it seems there are some users even now who can't get it running even with Pure Faction.

I wonder what the deal is with some games like that that don't work on modern Windows well (aside from 16-bit code that is). Like the awesome System Shock 2 was pretty flaky on modern Windows, even though it launched late enough that they should have been testing it on NT anyway. Meanwhile some pretty old games from WAY before normal people were running NT run just fine.

Can't remember what, but I remember some other game failing because modern GPUs return a list of features that's too long for the game to handle, or something like that!

Probably all just because they weren't coding right, like when Vista started (finally) enforcing some security things that really should have been the way you coded all along (like not writing randomly to anywhere in the registry) but some programers violated, so then people though VISTA IS BAD! when really the programers in question weren't doing their job.

Ive just got it and it won't run at all. The game launcher hangs solid the second I hit the "play" button. MIne is the old Windows XP too - should be even less alien an environment for RF1 to run in.

Same problem here.. I've got Windows XP..I click the shortcut, then click "play"..but nothing happens..

Ok..I have an update.. after a lot of trials I found this link, looking in the support section of gog.com.. http://purefaction.org
it's worth to give it a try as it solved my problems..so it's best to install pure faction patch and run Red faction through it (I have windows XP so start>all programs> pure faction 3.0>pure faction launcher.
Here is the page where i found the link and more details http://www.gog.com/forum/red_faction_series/red_faction_1_pure_faction_community_patch