That didn't stop Guild of Dungeoneering from being featured in consecutive sales. :P

Sure! I'm not born yesterday! I just don't want to break any rules here just to get rid of 2,3 games I don't fancy. My GOG account is important to me, I put in time and money into it. Thank you for the link - and the wise advice -, I could not see/find that thread.

You might need to look at a walkthrough to finish Ultima II. I recently completed it, and I think that without extra hints for the last part of the game it can be too demanding (unless you somehow figure the crazy mindset of the developers, you can get completely stuck in the game with no clue what to do next).

For Ultima I you should search online for the maps of the continents, which GOG for some reason does not provide in the goodies while it should. They are absolutely necessary to have good experience. I found them on one website dedicated to C64 games.

Thank you for the warning.

Yes, last night I quickly discovered I need some kind of guidance playing Ultima 1, the GOG game did not even come with keyboard instructions. Thankfully there's plenty of sites around offering guide, tips and materials.
I won't be following a complete walkthrough, just guidance (hopefully at least).

You're welcome! Ultima I can be easily completed without a walkthrough (but with the official maps, otherwise it's too easy to get lost in its world). Ultima II is very rough in the beginning, but a walkthrough is unnecessary for the most part.

There aren't really any rules about it as far as GOG is concerned however there are some community conventions of a sort that have come to be over time. Basically, straight up trading occurs in the trading threads and by reading through the first few posts in the threads, and seeing how other people go about it then following in a similar style you would be following common convention in a "when in Rome..." manner. :)

Another aspect is giving codes away to people, which is also frequently done but has gained conventions over time also. It is generally frowned upon in the community nowadays to post a key for a game (for any platform) directly in a thread outright. This is due to the common belief that there are leeches in the forums who have written bot software that scans threads and swipes up game codes and registers them without as much as a thank-you. As a result, there is a fairly large vocal group of people that frown upon that who have developed alternative conventions for giving away game codes that encourage people to engage with the community in conversation and to be grateful to one another. The community giveaway threads, as well as individual giveaway threads are in this fashion. Straight up gifts are usually done by mentioning you have a free game code to give away then waiting for people to respond and making sure they are not on any of the scammer/troll lists posted in the forums before deciding whom to gift it too based on your own criterion. That's the gist of it anyway. A convention called "MAHAYO" is followed, which means "make a human answer you" - which is intended to thwart off the bot leeches.

Hope this helps.

The screenshots for Theme Hospital on GOGs game card are in a rather strange resolution (710x533). Are they upscaled or is there any way to play Theme Hospital in a higher resolution than 640x480?

I own that one, I'll install it and see what I can get it to rock and roll at and post back in a bit...

Ok, the game only natively runs at 640x480 and 320x240 or thereabouts which was generally the norm for MSDOS based games back in the day. There does not appear to be a way to get the game to run in any higher resolution than that built into the game, and definitely not in modern widescreen.

There is however an open source reimplementation of the game engine called CorsixTH that you could try out, which defaults to your desktop resolution. It is not 100% complete however so you may experience bugs/problems with it, but it might be worth giving it a shot anyway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKWPqNEEcfE
http://mygaming.co.za/news/features/12385-how-to-play-theme-hospital-in-full-hd-right-now.html

HTH

Just be sure it's a fair trade you're after, too. If the game has been given away for free en masse recently (whether you realize it or not), you might get a decent amount of flak for trying to trade it off rather than just giving it away. May sound weird to mention, but there's been issues like that in the past. Of course, occasionally you'll get that super-nice user who gifts you during the trade anyways, so you never know.

Thanks! It's very exhaustive. I had already read the OP in the thread and of course posting the codes in clear view is not a good idea. I did not think about bots but I figured that it's better to send them directly. I had already given Steam codes for the Giveway thread through zeogold, because I really don't care about Steam and I don't have any use for those. Hooray for GOG!

A lot of "late" DOS programs also had support for higher resolutions like 800x600 or even 1024x768 on some SVGA cards (although with reduced color depth). That's why I'm asking.

Yes, I've read about CorsixTH. I'll try to compile it for my system when I have a bit more time for it. Thanks!
But I assume that GOG or the publisher of a game only uses the delivered game version and not a 3rd party engine to create game snapshots. So these snapshots seem to be upscaled, no idea why they have done that.

Yeah, the late 90s DOS games with support for 640x480 and above were pretty much all DPMI games (32bit) which used VESA VBE in order to have a linear memory mapped framebuffer. Prior to that programming SVGA was complex and very hardware dependent due to SVGA not being a standard, and complete lack of a driver abstraction layer. Additionally since the video buffer was mapped into 16bit DOS above the 640k mark and accessed using real mode segmented memory architecture, it was very performance costly to try to address more than a single 64kB segment of video memory, so video games stuck to video modes that fit within 64kB so that they could calculate pixel offsets into the framebuffer directly, whereas if they used video modes beyond 64kB they had to calculate which bank the pixels would reside in, then the offset into that bank, then program the hardware to switch banks back and forth - it was all very performance costly.

But when DPMI became a thing and exposed the 32bit processor architecture to DOS programs using a flat memory model, and VESA VBE became a standard that was widely adopted, along with the Scitech UniVBE implementation that was most commonly used - games could now access all the memory in the computer in one linear memory pool, and all of video memory in a flat space as well which eliminated the software bottlenecks. That coupled with local bus video hardware solutions allowed pixels to be pushed to the video hardware much faster overcoming the hardware bottlenecks. That's when we started seeing games take advantage of it like Warcraft II and beyond, and games started moving to higher resolution VBE based video modes with a linear framebuffer and higher colour depths rather than the old-school VGA based hacktastic Mode-X that was common in the first half of the decade. Those were fun times! :o)

Even for games that did use VBE though, they did not always support multiple resolutions. Warcraft II and Starcraft for example were 640x480 but did not allow resolution customization. It wasn't until games started using Windows APIs that resolution customization of high resolution games became really common IIRC. Before that it was hit and miss with different VBE based games.

No idea about the GOG screenshot resolution thing though.