ZP are selling Hardwar on Steam. This is probably an interesting development. A 100% DRM-free store is acting as a publisher and releasing their licensed games on Steam.

ZP just say temporarily Unavailable for all it's delisting . Your probably not going to see any games from Ziggurat Interactive because they had fallout with ZP. Technically all delisting are temporarily

I was not aware of that and it is very disappointing if that's the case (not as though CDPR doesn't sell several games there but it does stand out more for Zoom-Platform). Not sure what it has to do with the part you quoted though.
Is there public information on this apparent fallout? Same for foad's earlier comment about EA.

Yes that's true but with what I thought someone said about Zoom-Platform's contracts, there would conceivably be more reason to believe a game would be back sooner rather than later.

It's the first time I hear anything about Ziggurat Interactive, however the story with EA comes straight from the horse's mouth. Unfortunately I can't post links to other games stores here, as per forum rules, but if you search for "Title Updates, a New Game and a Public Letter" on a certain store's news section (posted Sep 1, 2022), you'll find it soon enough.

Everything is on ZP discord.

I gave you an example what they might do with their special contracts.

For the situation with EA games add this to the ZP URL:
/news/title-updates-a-new-game-and-a-public-letter

The situation with Throwback Entertainment and Ziggurat Interactive was mentioned by the owner on their Discord channel. Their games probably won't return to ZP.

Thanks for the responses, much-appreciated.

Alien Trilogy is fine, if you adjust DOSbox settings. The game is decent but it could use a mouselook mod.

I wished we had the Amiga version which runs much smoother. When that game was released, VGA could not scroll properly and the version we have here really hurts my eyes.


edit: Of course VGA was enhanced at some point, but the games released prior to that do not use the according commands for smooth scrolling.
It's good that we have the game at all, but if you have the choice, play the Amiga (or better: CD32) version in an emulator.

What settings do you suggest? I mess around with the settings, but could never get FPS stable.

WOW that was he that started the original ZP thread wide eyed and innocently excited that I found somewhere that was selling Zone Raiders (of all things!)
I had no idea it had run for 7 years and 42 pages before getting shut down by GOG in 2022 - that's pretty wild!

Think the thing about supporting platforms as small as them (apart from everything else) is that they could disappear tomorrow and take your games library there with them - I'm sure most people here will have been burned by something like this at some point, mine was Desura!

zoom is not a viable option, its even more niche than gog and they wont get many games. They already mentioned on their discord that publishers said they are content with gog so they didnt get the game on their store.

This is a total non issue.

I have seen as many games disappear from ZOOM Platform and then appear at GOG as I have the other way around, and many of course exist at both stores.

This is no more than the game provider (developer or publisher) playing around with marketing and engaging in contract flexing. They are the ones who decide what is available to appear where.

It is a good thing there is another store solely focused on DRM Free games, though to be perfectly honest, most of the time pricing at ZOOM Platform leaves a lot to be desired, and they are very slow to grow what is available.

I still check ZOOM Platform regularly, as I do GOG even more so, and while I have bought over 20 games from ZP, I've not done so in a good long time now, while in that same period I have bought hundreds from GOG.

So right now it is a laugh and half of ridiculous to see ZOOM Platform as any kind of threat to GOG.

What's with the Amiga having superior version of games? I found out years ago that Amiga had the best version of desert strike.

Well, that's a long story, I'll focus on the technical aspect :)
The 16Bit consoles of the days were by far superior to everything that the PC could offer and the design of the Amiga allowed graphical enhancements that were not thinkeable of at the time. It also stood up against all other 16Bit machines. Since you could change the palette of the graphic bitplanes on the fly, it was possible to get 4096 colors on one screen. But even the 16 color and 32 color games looked better than on other systems with the same color depth. At some point it got a 32+32 color mode for games, which was hardly ever used however. It had preemptive multi tasking, preventing that one task could stop the whole system.
Sure, at some point Nintendo and especially Sega catched up graphically and partially also surpassed it (not when it came to music. While all others used synthesizers, the Amiga could play four wave samples at the same time, with software support more. Turrican 2 used 7 channels), but this machine was something else, mostly thanks to it's coprocessors. The PC was far behind. At some point VGA closed the graphic gap and with the introduction of the Soundblaster it was also better when it came to music. For a long time also semi professional musicians used the Amiga as cheap alternative to the big sampler systems and the A1200 emulation of a Macintosh with the same CPU was actually faster and cheaper than the Mac itself. It found also it's way as a controller for example for disco lights.
Someone even created a raytraced render video with his Amiga - in 1985! Google "juggler amiga". Sure, it's very simple.But this was done with a 7MHz 16 Bit processor.

Why it died? Complete and utterly failure in marketing. While the Amiga was designed to support all sorts of extensions which actually existed (graphic cards, better processor, hard drives, ...), Commodore for some reason hesitated long to promote these, they were more interested in selling new models. But the A500 was so successful, that hardly anyone saw the need to upgrade and software studios would focus on the most common model of course.
And since hard discs were never promoted, bigger games on multiple floppies could be a bit of a pain in the ass, even if one had four floppy drives installed - which had to be supported by the game of course. Many games only looked for data on df0:

Keeping the games alive in emulators is a legal problem, because part of the operating system is stored in a ROM chip or on a disk (early models) and is still under copyright, has to be licenced (formerly from Commodore, now from Cloanto)