Darling_Jimmy: Thanks very much for creating this extractor - maybe now I can now finally give Boxer users a practical solution for getting the goodies out of GOG installer archives. I get a lot of support requests asking how to do it.

(At some point in the future I may try to reverse-engineer the archive format enough to build in extraction directly into Boxer; but I'd much rather spend that time and effort trying to convince the GOG team to at least start offering the games as zips.)

rampancy: the reason GOG's distribution of UW1&2 doesn't work in Boxer isn't because the installer is doing some voodoo, but because Boxer ignores the autoexec commands they've put in the DOSBox conf files, which are what run the games from the CD image. (Boxer can't 'see' inside the image in order to list out the individual programs and let you click to run them.)

Future versions of Boxer will improve their image support to work around this problem, and they may adapt the autoexec commands into a launchable batchfile also (though again, there's a limit to how much effort I want to put into coding specifically for GOG archives.)

Thanks for replying to the comments on here; I've heard over and over that you're a long time forum denizen but I've never had the good fortune up until now to see you around...

I eventually got around this issue with a little deductive reasoning; I looked at the autoexec files and saw that they made calls to the actual game executables which were on the bundled GOG disk image (this originally confused me, as when I originally used Universal Extractor all I got were a bunch of config files). I opened up the disk image in Disk Utility and copied the contents of the disk image over to the root level of the game's folder. Voila, everything worked in Boxer. I know I had to do this for another game I own from GOG which needs DOSBox, but the name escapes me at the moment.

In any case, I can totally understand why you wouldn't want to put too much effort into targeting support for GOG's installers.

Thanks again for all of the work you've put into Boxer. GOG's Mac users salute you!

I have been having trouble with Master Of Magic myself ... I have the game installed on my windows partition and I copied it over to the Mac side and when I try to run the installer in Boxer it runs the MoM installer which for some reason fails to work, but then it lets you play the game anyway. However, the second you quit of Boxer, the game disappears from the Boxer game shelf. I was about to make a thread in the MoM forum but thought this might also be a good place to mention it. :)

Agreed ... hear hear!

This sounds like Boxer isn't recognising your Master of Magic folder as a pre-installed GOG game (it looks for certain telltale files, like configuration files and GOG-specific programs), and instead treats it as a game that needs installing. If so, then tell Boxer to just skip the installer instead of running it, and it'll import it properly.

In general, if you try to import a game and the installer doesn't work, or if the installer starts up the game once it's finished, then quit back to DOS when you can and tell Boxer to finish importing. Otherwise, closing the window during an import will abort the import (after you confirm it) and delete the 'unfinished' gamebox - even if the game had finished installing, and you were already playing it. This is because Boxer doesn't 'know' that installation is complete until you tell it so.

(Future Boxer versions will improve the close confirmation prompt, so that you can finish importing then and there without having to quit to DOS first.)

Thanks!

How does your script work exactly Darling_Jimmy?

Did you just reverse engineer the installer and pull out the data that way? Any chance you would release the source?

What he essentially did is package a pared-down version of WINE with an app that executes the installer, telling it to put the contents in a folder. I tried using it to extract the contents of my copy of Redneck Rampage, but it kept on crapping out asking for dependencies (like FreeType).

I would love to release the source code: Bundled this little script & WINE with the help of Platypus. That's it.

If anybody wants to improve the project, you have my blessing.