LogFAQs > #982083029

adjl posted...

Realistically, PC games that are old enough to come on discs in the first place are either so old that they're intrinsically hard to find, have already been ported through GOG or a similar service, or are abandonware and you can just find downloads of them for free. In many cases, being that old also means you run into compatibility issues, though pretty much anything for Windows XP or later tends to work well enough. All of that means there just isn't much demand for them, which doesn't give people much incentive to create a supply.

The other problem is that some older games have their game speed clocked to the CPU speed, which makes them almost impossible (or outright impossible) to play on newer computers (this was a huge problem with the original Gabriel Knight, for instance).

It is possible to run those sorts of games on something like DOSBox and throttle the CPU to fix the issue, but that's also more trouble than a lot of players are going to be willing to go through.

Though speaking of Gabriel Knight, that is a good example of another problem with older games - they released a 20th anniversary version of that game for newer computers, but the new version is kind of shit. But once newer, shittier versions of games are released into the ecosystem, it can make it even harder to try and track down earlier, better versions (in the same vein as the original Star Wars trilogy theatrical releases versus the Special Editions).

That's part of my problem with the Baldur's Gate "Enhanced" Edition games - they fixed a few things from the original games (good!), but broke or ruined a lot of other things (bad!), to the point where I vastly prefer the originals (especially if you run them with mods like Tutu). But good luck finding the original version - pretty sure GoG only carries the Enhanced Edition, the console releases are only EE, and so on.