I used to love this game. I brought it back in the day, and (despite still possessing the CD) brought it again because I never owned the expansion.
Almost all my gaming is done under Debian, and sometimes (such as in this case) using WINE. This works great for the original Dark Reign installation, but that requires either CDemu and a TOC rip, or the original CD in the drive for a perfect experience - including the original soundtrack during gameplay (you don't need CDemu just to get it to run though – either manually copying the CD files to wherever D: is configured to look in winecfg, or mounting the image on a loopback device and mounting that somewhere and pointing winecfg to it will suffice).
This is due to a basic form of copy protection.
As I probably should have expected however, GOG have made a few modifications to the version they sell - they certainly don't force you to download an ISO, burn that and keep it in your drive while playing. Unfortunately, the hack/crack they appear to have used doesn't seem to work at all under WINE - they have basically created two new executables "Dark Reign - Original Game.exe" and "Dark Reign - Expansion.exe" which I simply can't get to execute correctly. DKREIGN.EXE does execute, and can get you to the main game menu, but doesn't let you continue because it can't detect a CD in the drive (just as the original would without the disc). :/
If I put my original Dark Reign disc in the drive, I can play the GOG version fine – for the original campaign only. I even tried just dumping the game disc files and using winecfg to make that D:, and that also worked with the GOG download - and surprisingly I still get audio. There is a "Sounds" sub-directory once installed (which my original version doesn't install) that contains 10 MP3 files - presumably the equivalent of the CD audio tracks one of the original Dark Reign game CDs originally included, and the game must be modified to use them instead. So it *appears* that most users won't miss out on audio when using the current GOG version (or at least not all of it).
I'm not sure if there are any other differences from the original at this stage.
Ultimately, I brought this game so I could play the expansion (since the original worked so well under WINE), but this is not the real original Dark Reign expansion files as sold back in the day and is basically of no use to me. GOG *should* be offering TOC rips of the original CD in cases such as this, but I have not seen it offered. If you're a GNU/Linux user like me, there's not much point buying this title from GOG at this time.
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