I was wondering about installing the GOG version of Morrowind or maybe Oblivion on a flash drive/external hard drive from my home PC and then being able to play either game from it's own flash drive on a different PC, but I just don't know how exactly to go about this or what software to use.

A bigger concern would be speed of access to the files. Your loading times would be affected by the speed at which files can be retrieved from the external drive.

In a lot of cases, unless the game is relatively old, it is a lot of work to get it running portable like that. Games require a fair few bits to run, c++ extensions, directx versions, reg entries. Not to mention as mentioned above running on less than a 3.0 USB connection will slow it all down. That's not to say games can't be portabilised, it's just not straight forward and is game specific.

What I would say as an alternative, and what I often do, is install the game on the different machines, then just copy the save games to a portable drive (you may even be able to setup an automated process to backup saves to portable drive before exit or something). In this way you keep as many saves as you want and use them on as many installs as you like. The only caveat being the install on each machine should be the same, can't put modx on one and not the other (and for morrowind/oblivion you will want mods!). For instance: morrowind rebirth and overhaul. And oblivion I use bevilex modlist over at nexus.

So uh... How do you tell oblivion GOG where to store save data, IE to play at school from computer to computer.

Hmmm. A harder question to answer.

If it would work, i'd probably make a batch file that goes to where the save WOULD be, and redirect it to your thumb drive instead. Though drive letters, mounting and other details not sure if they change how that would be handled.

Course windows 7 (and later?) do support mounting to a directory.

So....

Try formatting a flash drive to have 2 partitions, then mounting one to a directory to which it would be saved, and unmount after?

I've done before where i have a script create a ramdrive, copy/extract files, run the game from the ramdrive, then when the game ends it removes it from ram. Doing a batch file to mount the directory, then unmount after it's no longer needed might work... Depending on command syntax needed and the like.

I don't have Admin rights where I'm going, so I can't access computer management.
I was hoping for some sort of syntax in the default ini so that oblivion would drop it where it needs to be, then oblivion stores the actual save in my thumbdrive. Hey do you have a discord? I'd prefer to chat there if you have one.

It likely uses a path involving %My Documents% or %APPDATA%.

Though... It might be possible to edit those paths and make a modified exe in which you could specify a directory.

Probably would be null terminated, and would be worth trying. If you did that it would have to have a fixed directory, like d:\save or e:\save (though you could have multiple exe's saved depending on the drive-letter it was mounted as). Better yet, this is a hack you don't need any programming knowledge about to do, the final path just has to be equal or smaller than the path in the exe file.

There is a small chance the save location can be found/modified via the registry, but I'd have to get the GoG version to see what is there before i could tell you what approach might work.

As for Discord, yes i have it, but not something i like using, and not something that is easy, i tend not to use it for privacy reasons.

Umm...why bother though? Can't you just manually copy&paste the save file? Why jumping through hoops just for a save? =\

Ignoring the fact that copy&paste of the saves would be easy and probably the smallest problem, you could use NTFS Symbolic Links to have the save location wherever you want.

If you are going to bother with it, then you just have try and see the result. Worst case you'll learn something about it. :)

1. Install the game from the home computer. Try also with alternatives, like OpenMW and others. You can't do anything anyway if the schools computer doesn't have the necessary libraries for the game (you can actually ask the administrators if they could help you install something - and many schools should already have a certain amount of libraries in their ecosystem to support various software).

2. Speed. Old games can do just fine with USB2 or even 1, however, waiting for a big/newer game to load when not using USB3 is a pain. SSD disk would be the best option.

3. Some games do run just fine even if it doesn't detect any registry entry for it, so it would revert to the difficult settings for saves, which usually is in the users profile, somewhere. Find out where on your computer and then check for the same folders/files on the schools computer.

4. If you have a laptop/tablet with Linux/Win (or even Android on) why not just go with OpenMW, and take it with you to the school?

https://blog.en.uptodown.com/morrowind-android-openmw/

5. EDIT: Depending on how locked your schools computers are, best option is to install both windows and the game on a SSD disk, with a USB3/ESATA port on both computers, and just boot up with the external disk. But it's also the one option with most hazzle in the beginning to get it to work.

Doing things portable is fun in the beginning, especially with smaller/older software.





Then the hair-ripping and crying starts... :P

1: Done.
2: I've checked and speed is not an issue.
3: I can copypasta the saves, but I'd rather not.
4: Not an option.
5: Not an option. They've locked the BIOS and set the boot order. I couldn't get it to do that if I wanted to.