ORIGINAL OPENING POST:

Hello fellow Linux users!

I use innoextract (http://constexpr.org/innoextract/) to extract Windows GOG installers on my Linux gaming rig. But a change has come here: newest installers use RAR archiving (the .bin is a RAR archive), that innoextract can’t extract. I tried extracting directly the .bin, but it is password-protected.

dscharrer, the innoextract main developer, said he won’t try to support this format:
https://github.com/dscharrer/innoextract/issues/37

Has someone any idea how to extract these new installers without going through WINE?

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QUICK SUMMARY OF THE MATTER AT HAND:

In some of my free time spent unpacking GOG installers tu turn them into Linux stuff, I found out GOG is switching to a new kind of Windows installer. These new installers use a password-check at extracting time.
While this check is done automatically and silently while executing the installer, it adds some work to people wanting to work with these installers in a less standard way, for reasons including (but not limited to) backup of game data, getting the game to run on unsupported platforms, making custom installers/archives…
The password has been discovered thanks to the work of a couple talented hackers, and now the discussion as turned to:
_Why did GOG start using this new method?
_Would they consider dropping it?

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ANSWER FROM A GOG PROGRAMMER (a technical answer, he doesn’t speak for GOG.com here):

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/on_gnulinux_has_anyone_be_able_to_extract_the_rar_innosetup_installers/post120

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THE OFFICIAL GOG.COM ANSWER:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/on_gnulinux_has_anyone_be_able_to_extract_the_rar_innosetup_installers/post470

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WISHLIST ENTRY:

Here is a wishlist entry opened by shmerl, if you too think this inclusion of password checks in the new installers is anything but good practice:
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/dont_slip_into_drm_swamp_stop_using_password_protection_on_installer_packages

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WORKING WITH THE NEW INSTALLERS:

The technical discussion about this issue should move to another thread, seeing as this one is already discussing the moral implications of this new GOG choice. If you don’t care about wether or not these new installers are a good/bad practice, but you want to discuss on the ways to work with it, there you go:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/tech_gog_new_windows_installer_a_technical_thread

Looks like the switch to RAR archive as another consequence: the /SILENT switch of InnopSetup doesn’t work anymore. Actually, an InnoSetup installer launched with the switch /SILENT will act exactly like innoextract and ignore the RAR archive (.bin file).

Not sure about it, but it might be linked to the archive being password-protected.

As dscharrer said the issue is that it uses an unknown password. innounp might support it (I haven't checked) but that's Windows-only so again you'd end up using Wine.

The easiest solution at this point would be to set up Wine and run the GOG installer under Wine using the /nogui parameter.

I might be missing something here, but it looks like the /nogui switch only disable the GOG.com GUI, switching back to the standard InnoSetup one. So, nothing to do with a console mode?

That's what it does. But on some games the setup won't complete without the /nogui switch (a blank dialog box with 4 buttons appear, and you can't do anything to proceed with the setup).

So as long as the /nogui works, there's at least some way to get stuff out of the Win setups in Linux.

Hmmm well i know 7zip is able to extract rar archives, and i believe they include a Unix version and a commandline version so you shouldn't need Windows/Wine.

From github: If they were just ordinary archives there would be no problem of course. I haven't seen this myself, just going by what I read.

The RAR archive is password-protected.
Otherwise I would have posted a how-to instead of a call for help ;)

Well if a password is found out, probably make a note of it on my shaving the gog installer thread.

Hey, nice thread there!

Are you using Linux or Windows?
On the former case I might have a few tricks to share, as I’ve already written scripts for dozen of GOG games building a Debian package from a GOG Windows installer or Linux tarball. These scripts take care of stripping the games from shared dependencies to use the system-wide ones instead, is that close to what you’re trying to achieve?

Sort of. The original objective is just to make it smaller, both by making sure the internal zips and png's are compressed as best as possible (without taking say 10 years to do ten million iterations), as well as removing dependencies that you likely already installed for another game. Having the dependencies is fine, as long as it's easy to compress or find duplication somehow, or separate.

As for OS, my gaming rig uses Windows, but i will probably be using GNU/Linux a bit more, although which OS i'm not sure. Depends on projects, simplicity, etc.

Most of my work on the thread and it's cousin using zopfli is on low priority since unless i can redistribute the files to help everyone save space, then it's just me on my computer. At least all the zips/extras are getting the best attention (although they don't normally shrink much...)

Oh, this is very nasty. Can anything be done about it? Can GOG provide the password? May be it can be debugged in Wine to see what password it passes?

Any idea about how this could be done? (the debugging part)

I didn't know they used RAR files. Are there any tools to find passwords on RAR archives?

I have been using innounp to extract my games. It's too bad that there's no native linux binary for it, but it doesn't bother me much since I'll be using WINE to play Windows games anyway.