GOG’s Game Preservation Program Gets Tested Early By Blizzard (www.techdirt.com)

submitted 1 week ago by florencia@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/games@lemmy.world

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[-] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Proton is essentially just wine, but:

Backward compatibility in Wine is generally superior to that of Windows, as newer versions of Windows can force users to upgrade legacy Windows applications, and may break unsupported software forever as there is nobody adjusting the program for the changes in the operating system

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

Valve's has been financing the development of Proton (and wine), so their efforts are to improve an open source tool that can be used and enhanced by anyone, which among other things provides excellent compatibility. That is a much better commitment to preserving games than choosing a handful of titles and updating their compatibility layer when the old one breaks. In other words, GOG is choosing a couple of games to update their emulator periodically, Valve is financing the development of an emulator for old games. The two things are not even in the same league for how much they help preservation of old games as a whole.

As for the question of windows users, I don't think wine runs on Windows natively, but I assume one could use WSL as a stepping stone. In any case GOG's method also doesn't address Linux or MacOS users, so I don't see how bringing platform into the mix makes any difference.

[-] Kelly@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm all for platform level comparability (one of my major gripes with xbox BC was that BC of original xbox and 360 titles was implemented per-title and while some were supported most of the library was left behind).

But from a pragmatic perspective my home PC has always been Windows and preservation efforts that allow me to run the games I know on the hardware I am running will mean more to me.

I support the principal and encourage the cross platform efforts but its unlikely to mean much to me personally until its bundled in with a plug and play solution like Batocera.

I've edited my initial comment to reflect that not everyone will share my priorities.

[-] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

preservation efforts that allow me to run the games I know on the hardware I am running will mean more to me.

You mean software, your hardware is perfectly capable of running Linux+Wine. But again, this is a very personal response, my personal computer is Linux, therefore what GOG is doing means less to me by your own definition, which is why I don't think it makes any sense to try to bring platform into the table. In fact, since apparently they're responsible for the DOSBox version that a game uses, and there is a native version of DOSBox for Linux, this means that the decision of the game not being available on Linux is entirely on GOG.

Imagine Valve was financing an emulator, and GOG was compromising themselves to keep a binary updated with the latest version of that emulator whenever problems appeared on the old version, which of them is doing more for the preservation of games? The only difference is that the "emulator" Valve is financing is not the same as the one that GOG is using.

I'm not saying that there isn't value in what GOG is doing just because it doesn't affect me, but as is they can only help preserve DOS era games, so investing in DOSBox and hosting the ROMs would be a much more valuable approach (half of it they're already doing, they do in fact host the ROMs, you just get 50 extra copies of DOSBox in the process). What I'm saying is that I don't understand why everyone thinks they're so great for doing what they're doing, they could be investing in getting wine to run on windows which would be a much better effort for the preservation of games for your platform.