The code wheel is Windows-only, written by gog I guess. I guess someone could make a 3rd party Linux version, but I'm not interested enough in the game to do it myself.

I use my own Linux dosbox (with munt & glide support) for all my dosbox games (i.e., I don't even use gog's Linux dosbox setups). It's easy enough to diff the config files to duplicate gog's settings and some games require minor config. For this game, my launcher script also runs the code wheel in the background using wine before starting up dosbox. The only games I might reconsider this for is the games that have Windows-only dosbox patches (e.g. EOB), but for now I'd rather just live without.

Heck I've played Starflight I on Linux and I bought the game from GOG. The setup.exe file must be new or maybe I unpacked the files using wine, don't remember.

But yea, I agree, for DosBox based games, just let us download a zip file or similar, don't bury the (now) cross-platform game an a bunch of windows specific packaging. Why go to extra work to make a game *less* portable?