Some of us are buying games for use with legacy, *real* DOS machines. You guys selling us the "SCUMM-VM" version of such games is absolutely worthless. Can you please stop? Or, at the very least, clearly mark such games as "SCUMM-VM version" so we know ahead of time that such versions are going to be worthless to us? Or, how about offering both versions? That would make everybody a winner.
Thank you in advance.

Ah, I was wondering when this thread would arrive, it's been a hot minute.

A) That's never been the MO of GOG.

B) Even if the downloads were provided, who's to say that you'd be able to run them correctly on your machine? I was there, and it was a nightmare.

Ya this ^^. Thread kinda feels like going on Steam and asking that they change their distrubtion model to actually release physical versions of games again and preferably either on 700MB Cds or 5,25 Inch Floppy Disks :D.

And ya GOG in its lifecycle never sold games targeted at "real DOS Machines" - not even in the beginnings of the platform at a point in time where the amount of users maybe still having a legacy machine somewhere standing around would have been at least "small" and not like now in 2023 almost non existent. So ya even if they somehow now would provide these versions and dunno add a "no support for this flag" the amount of buyers would be close to nil and most likely even with a high refund rate or people still complaining that it doesnt run. And ya GOG is a commercial store and not a software museum.

It's not exactly what I'd call clearly marked but they do put "This game is powered by ScummVM." in small print near the bottom of the game page. No idea if it's actually there for every ScummVM game though.

I'd like to see them provide all of the game files too. People could choose to use DOSBox then as well.

If you're buying GOG games for old DOS systems not only have you ignored the system requirements on the store pages, you've ignored the mission statement of GOG itself. Old games, new hardware & OSes. That being said I do wish that wherever possible the original versions are shipped either as an extra or within the installation. But this clearly is a side-dish and not the main meal so-to-speak.

First of all: Yes, it would be cool if the games also run under DOS.

But
1. the flag you are asking for is already on GOG, see attachment
2. Most games - with some exceptions - also have their original .exe file included. I think SImon 1+2 don't contain the .exe
In other cases (Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis for example), the .exe mas moved to a subdirectory called "other".
3. GOG does not support MS-DOS

I'm going to side with the OP here. There's less effort involved in just keeping the original DOS .exe vs working out what are 'safe' to delete (that will be ignored by ScummVM anyway) and virtually no space saved by deleting them (often literally kilobytes which is less than what GOG add themselves via the 20MB of adverts that are shown in offline installers, etc). People who want ScummVM can use it (by default), and those who want to run it in DOS / DOSBox can do so too without being driven to Abandonware sites to find the missing files (which is hardly in GOG's interest to accidentally end up doing that). Best of both worlds. And solves a "problem" that shouldn't have even been a problem in the first place. It also gives more flexibility to allow people to run it on other devices. Eg, perhaps a game works better via Magic DOSBox than ScummVM for Android.

They don't delete in most cases. Simon1+2 and Kyrandia seem to be missing the .exes, but right now I can't think of any others.

ps: In the case of Monkey Island 1+2 SE (not Scumm games), there exists a mod that creates a working DOS version out of what GOG distributes.

gOg's mission is to sell classic games that work out of the box on modern machines, for which selling "original" version are not good. you could make an argument of including them as a bonus, but the main product will always be in a way that somone can just click and play on their w11 machine

They deleted (then put them back) for some games like Indiana Jones Last Crusade / Fate of Atlantis. Last time I looked though, they were still missing from Beneath A Steel Sky, Flight Of The Amazon Queen, Lure of the Temptress, etc. They aren't as aggressive at doing it now as they were at one point. Then I suppose common sense kicked in when it became obvious it's rather counter-productive for a store that's in business to sell games to drive people back to Abandonware sites to get the full game (for free) that they originally came here to buy only to find bits missing despite paying for it... Sometimes it's silly, eg, INDY256.EXE (Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade) takes up 59.7kb (or half the size of the 116kb GOG EULA.txt...) or about 300x times smaller than all the "GOG stuff" added to offline installers (visible when unpacking in InnoExtract with the -g switch). The "Talkie Versions" that combine original art style with Special Edition voice track? Yeah they work well. I have them running on an Android tablet that way - a perfect real-world use case scenario of how people run old games outside of the "but... but... but... you're only 'allowed' to use Windows 11/12/365" bubble some people here seem obsessed with artificially gating old content behind with zero positive upside...

Ok, so it's more than I was aware of. I thought
Actually when I first prepared my ScummVM-Collection, I also removed everything non essential (exes, dlls and sys files, copyright notices). Now in hindsight I know it was a mistake and it would take some time to restore everything.


Yes, that's one option. I am not sure however, how well this works for DOS since it would require a wave sound card and I didn't notice support for specific cards (like soundblaster, maestro or disney). It was designed to be used with ScummVM. If at all, then it's probably meant to be used with DOSBox which offers a soundblaster emulation.
If I wanted the "real" feeling, I would go for DOS with MIDI music and without the voice track. In the case of MI that would still not be the original EGA version, but it would be close to it. And of course the code wheel would be missing in any case. But it gets close to the originals, which I still have on some CD collection somewhere.

This is "Peak 2023" - I'm not comfortable with the thought that a small minority of current customers should be trying to prevent GoG from providing something that the majority of current customers want, especially when the views of the majority are aligned with the mission statement of the store.

As others have rightly said, GoG is here to provide classic games working on modern operating systems - its "mission" isn't to provide the files for the original hardware.

SCUMMvm also provides some good quality of life improvements that a DOSBox version wouldn't (e.g. ability to have both subtitles and voices in some talkie versions of games where this wasn't available out of the box - a stupid design decision that I'm happy to be able to correct)

I would support GoG providing these as an unsupported extra in the form of an ISO or archive file that a user could put on original media (assuming that the agreements they have with the IP holders allow this) but the unsupported part of this is the critical bit - this can't be allowed to take up support's time.

I'd also say that were GoG to do this, if an IP holder didn't allow the game to be distributed in such a way, GoG should accept this and not further restrict the choice of titles we have available here.

As an edit, I'd also say that GoG shouldn't really remove the executables unless they really have to.

It would be enough not to remove the components needed to run the game in DOS. This way, both parties would be happy. There is no need for extras, just leaving the games untouched would do.

You are right about the licence holders of course. If they say "no", then it's "no". But I doubt that most of them really care.

I agree with you - my initial sentence was a reaction to OP going "Stop selling stuff using SCUMMvm".

I'm happy with a compromise that gives both sets of users what they want, but not with OP's knee-jerk first suggestion.

Some peeps are very happy with Scumm:)