I see a lot old games here I owned when floppys were 5.25" more or less and floppy. As computer speeds increased, there were many games that became unplayable because the timing mechanism was based on chip speed instead of always timing off seconds. Also, as one poster discussed, the game literally rewrote or appended to the executable file, which made saving impossible. GOG needs a section that plainly states what to expect in the mechanics of opening, and saving game states. I'm too old to go trolling the net for a certain version on DOSBOX, timers, and videocard work arounds. I can just go buy an xbox and practice pole dancing---NOT! Please point me in the right direction. Examples: Starflight, and Darklands. These should be replayable, but last time I tried expanded memory and awful sound scheme made Darklands unworkable off the 5.35" floppys, and starflight couldn't even be read.

Check the specific sub forums for the game you want for common problems. Some work out of the box, some have minor problems (e.g. you have to set processor affinity or some such), some seem unresolvably broken for some people. In general they're pretty functional for the great majority of players. But these games are old and OSes have changed. Hell, I remember games I'd purchased not working out of the box very well and never getting any patches, back when many of these were released. It's PC gaming, it's just kind of what I expect.

All in all, very playable, but there are a few games with a 'few' problems.

As Orcishgamer said, always check the subforums.

Not at all.

Right now with the exception of the free ones, they are not playable to me because I do not own them :sad:

Most of the games sold through GOG are perfectly playable- they'll use either a preconfigured installation of DOSBox, or have the game tweaked as necessary to run on modern hardware and OSes (the only caveat here is that for Vista and Win7 you should install the games outside of the Program Files directory, as doing so can result in some problems and funky behavior, particularly with saving). There are, of course, exceptions in the form of a few games that simply don't work well even after the GOG tweaking, but you can usually spot these pretty quick by looking through the forum for each game before buying.

Short version- the games will work just fine most of the time, but just double-check in the specific game forum first before you buy, just to be on the safe side.

Most of the games on here do work, GOG can't really do much with patches or alter the files since they don't really own the games. But if you get a game that doesn't work, look for patches somewhere, I just did this with NeverWinter Nights an hour ago

They always break. I suggest you ring up your local insurance provider before you attempt to play any of these GOG titles.

I have Windows Vista, and I've never had any problems whatsoever running any game, or with saving files. I've never had to tweak anything to get them to run. (knock on wood...)

And if a game doesn't work "out of the box", you have a great community to fall back to.

An evening spent playing a game from GOG would be more fun than getting friction burns on your 5.25" floppy whilst pole dancing.

I never had any major problems with gog games. Ok, sometimes framerate was ridiculously low, sometimes image was flickering, but the community knows all the answers how to deal with such problems.

Only few games have major bugs, like Dungeon Keeper 2.

All games I bought and started so far were at least runnable on my 2 years old windows 7 computer. Kings Bounty shows graphics distortions which impact game experience somewhat and for starting Battle Isle I had to start with admin privileges and would otherwise obtain a cryptic error message. But apart from that everything is fine. Of course some of these games are old and aged somewhat. Especially I found that the user interface has improved a lot. I am missing tooltips over buttons badly for some games, although Age of Wonders had them. Anyway bad games are not GOG's fault.

My impression is they are well tested and run on at least 90% of all computer configurations out there.

I've played a number of games from here and have not had any problems with any of them.

Two separate machines, both with Windows 7 64-bit.