Good Old Games Adds Mac OS X Support

SquarePixel writes "The nostalgic games seller Good Old Games has added Mac OS X support to its platform and a catalog of games to go with it. 'During its much-ballyhooed news-a-thon, GOG drew back the curtain on a new version of its service tailored to Macs, which brings with it 50 games (eight of which you receive free just for signing up) and some rather tempting deals. Speaking of, there's this insane 32-game pay-what-you-want Interplay special leading the charge in celebration of GOG's fourth anniversary.'" Unfortunately, Linux support doesn't seem to be in the cards just yet. On a list of requested site features, Linux support has gotten quite a few votes, but a GOG employee said, "Linux is a great platform, and we love how much passion you guys are showing for it here on our wishlist. ... If we're able to bring GOG.com games to Linux--and we're constantly evaluating ways that we can do this--we want to make sure that we're doing it the GOG.com way: simple, easy, and it 'just works.' I'm not telling you guys to give up hope--we know how much you want this--but what I am saying is that this is harder to support than it might seem initially, and we're not ready to move to support Linux officially just yet."

Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Cley Faye]

I was under the impression that a lot of the old games are merely dos version packaged with dosbox. I know I use some game I got from GoG under linux, just unpacking it and launching it "by hand".
Am I missing something? I don't see how hard it would be to just package the same thing with a linux version of dosbox...

Re:Isn't it mostly dosbox ?

[Hatta]

No, you're not missing anything. Anyone who can run Dosbox can run GoG downloads with a small bit effort unpacking their archive.

What would be great is if GoG would distribute some classic Mac games like Marathon or Escape Velocity. Or the 640x480 Mac version of Dark Forces. These games need to be more easily available.

No such thing as a Linux OS

[Anonymous Coward]

What people in the Linux community tend to forget is there is no such thing as the Linux operating system. There are dozens of operating systems based upon Linux, but there isn't any one Linux platform to target. If GOG rolls out support for, say, Ubuntu, they will have hundreds of Arch users still nagging them for support. If they support Red Hat, they leave Debian out in the cold. It's virtually impossible to support all Linux desktop distributions because there's no lowest common denominator and the various projects are in constant flux.

Re:Already playing for years on the Mac via DOSBox

[MysteriousPreacher]

Presumably these would be licensed copies of the games. That and the games packaged in a way that doesn't require torrenting and then fiddly set-up.