Holy shit it worked. Why didn't I think of this earlier? It seems like GoG has implemented a brute-force way of disabling alt-tab by finding a process called terran.exe or terranx.exe and disabling alt-tab if an executable with said name is running. I doubt there will be problems when you rename it. Although I hope GoG can look into this issue and allow us to disable whatever GoG has implemented that forced alt-tab to be disabled. It's a really messy implementation, GoG.


This thread should be stickied, thanks Petek!

Wow thanks! Such a simple solution. :) I already added a section in the GOGwiki.

I would think it would be illegal to implement a disabling of control+exit (United States) unless one also informs how to reverse it. Legally, in the U.S., the machine has to accept commands from the user. Renaming the executable is not the best solution.

While you can simply use contorl+alt+delete, and I think it was likely done to avoid compatability issues, I don't like things done in my computer without my knowledge and would appreciate knowing how this was done. I would think a lot of users who play old games are technically oriented and would agree.

Indeed, but I'm not in the US. Still though, they should have allowed the user to toggle the disablement of alt-tab by themselves though.

Also the way they implemented it implies that they are actually manipulating something outside of the actual executable in order to disable alt-tab, which is something I do not like.

Yes, but you will soon be dead from a Three-week standoff involving a band of Filipino rebels who stormed a northern Borneo village has now claimed at least 26 lives.

Oh damn, this news has even reached the US now!?

No, it's reached my international news hub.

GOG support has sent me a .bat file to enable alt-tab in the game completely without workarounds. Unfortunately hotmail blocks all files with the .bat extension and I was unable to open it, and GOG.com hasn't replied to me when I asked them to rename the format of the file.

Hotmail is awful.

EDIT: Never mind I got the .bat file. However, it did not work, even after running it as administrator. It's only two lines.

Here are the contents of the game.bat file: http://pastebin.com/yCsM8n6X

It gives an error saying "Error: couldn't open SDB 'C:\Windows\system32\game.sdb'"

Yeah no idea why is it looking for this SDB file in my system32. It's in my Alpha Centauri folder.

According to support you place this in the root folder of Alpha Centauri, didn't work though.

EDIT EDIT: Problem solved, I copied sdbinst.exe from the system32 folder into the Alpha Centauri folder, I suppose sdbinst only looks for the root file if you do not give it the address.

Can someone now edit this information into the wiki? I can't be bothered to make a wiki account myself, thanks!

Done. I have changed the procedure in the batch file a bit. You have to set the game folder of SMAC manually in the file, but after that, just run as admin and it goes fine.

This is a quite clever way from GOG to disable Alt+Tab. They use “shims” which integrate in the way a specific .exe file interacts with the system. These shims are installed alongside the game, but as these files (game.sdb, game_add.sdb) are still available in the game folder, you can use them to deactivate this procedure once and for all.

for example empire earth3
cd C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Empire Earth III
sdbinst -u gog_ee3.sdb