Hi everyone!

This has already been mentioned in older posts in the forum, but I thought to write a summary because judging by the comments not everyone is aware of this.

GOG's Colonization includes *both* the MS-DOS and the Windows versions of the game, although the latter is a bit hidden.

So here are the details:

If you download and run the game installer from GOG (Windows, Mac or Linux, it doesn't matter) and you go to the folder where the files are unpacked you'll find the original DOS game (version 3.0, 7 Feb 1995) under MPS/COLONIZE. That's the game that you get if you launch Colonization normally, so that's what most people see and play.

However, there are two extra files in the MPS/COLONIZE folder that are not part of the MS-DOS game, because they're actually the CD image of the Windows version of Colonization (without the audio tracks). The CD image is in .BIN/.CUE format although the files here have different extensions: COLONIZE.GOG (.BIN file) and COLONIZE.DAT (.CUE file).

In Windows you can open that image with WinCDEmu, PowerISO or a similar tool, in Linux or Mac you can convert it to .iso with bchunk and then use it directly on a Windows VM and install it. This is an old Windows 3.x game so I don't know if it runs on Windows 10/11 (I use Linux myself) but it definitely runs on a Windows XP VM.

Finally, in the same Windows CD image there is an additional folder called COL_DOS that contains an older version of the MS-DOS game (v2.25, 15 Sep 1994).

So in total there are three different versions included in the GOG package: two MS-DOS versions and one Windows version.

I hope that the information is useful.

Enjoy!

Note: this has been tested with the following installer files:

- Linux: gog_sid_meier_s_colonization_2.0.0.5.sh
- Windows: setup_colonization_3.0_(28043).exe
- Mac: colonization__sid_meier_s_enUS_gog_3_34114.pkg