Just giving you guys a small update on this.

I've been working on pinnounp every day since starting on it and progress is fairly slow but constant. Main cause of the slowness has been that I am now effectively porting 2 programs (innounp and wrestool) and they are both in languages that I don't know very well (Pascal and C respectively).

I am quite surprised at how much help I've been offered (both publicly and privately) and I just want to extend my thanks to you all for the support :)

Hope to have something for you all to start testing soon!

Congrats on your success with getting pinnounp to work. We look forward to testing it soon!

No, thank you xyem for taking the initiative and doing some good work for the GOG and Linux community. I'm glad I started this thread, although I know you were flirting with the idea for a while. At least you have lots of testers!

I probably could help out with this. I'm not very good at programming, but I do have some familiarity with C and quite a bit more with Perl.

None at all with Pascal, unfortunately.

Sorry that this is taking so long for me to do >.<

I've finished the "porting" of wrestool so I'm back to actually working on the innounp side of things again though.

I started developing a Python tool to extract Inno Setup packages. It is in early development and the code is available on github: https://github.com/lkraider/innounpy

Current status is trying to unpack the LZMA compressed parts of the binary (setup-0 and setup-1).

I love linux and I would love to buy linux games.
There are plenty of linux users who buy win32 gog executables because of no other choice.

GoG says "we are not planning for linux support", but they will. As soon as some other site starts to deliver those. As only great sales numbers can put them to rethink on this matter.

In my opinion linux gaming market is yet to be discovered. And it will grow like android did.
Much has changed since last attempt to populate linux with games.
Right now there are user-friendly distriburtions which share common underlaying infrastructure. Device drivers are now more easily available. Software and hardware companies seeks for interoperability. And of course total linux user base increased by big factor.
Not to mention that Microsoft itself will have to introduce linux support at some point. Which they already started to deliver in response to market demand.

First of all, GOG has never said that. Quite the opposite, they have only said they are "considering their options". Secondly, I recommend you read the closest thing we have to an official stance on the topic from GOG, it addresses many of your assumed pros of supporting Linux, which are not really the pros you think they are (different popular distros use different infrastructure, drivers are actually very fractured, very few software companies and only a handful of hardware companies even care about Linux). Lastly, MS supporting Linux!? what the heck are you talking about?

I admire your passion and dedication on this issue, especially if you have to learn a new language that you'll likely never use again for it (Pascal).

However, unpacking executables into it's parts could be construed as a form of reverse-engineering.

If you do it for yourself in your basement and never share it with anyone, nobody can burn you for it.

However, if you want to play it safe, you should probably run it with GOG before you do anything.

Heck, if you have their cooperation, they could probably give you the bloody files, thus saving you some work.

In fact, I'm puzzled by their lack of commenting in this thread.

He's only "unpacking" the installer, which is little more than a self-extracting archive. No reverse engineering involved and completely legal, hence why GOG didn't comment in this thread when it was current. They have since commented in much more current threads about Linux support.

Funny to see this topic back up!

I do think that Linux gaming will be a strong market (the HIBs are some evidence). But that point is not now and there will not be strong support until it becomes a clearly profitable market. This will likely coincide with a stronger Linux desktop presence.

As for reverse engineering - it's not. As Cogadh said, it's just opening the wrapper around the game files. That was what I requested in the original post - if GOG could just release the files without the wrapper.

I hope you're right, but I strongly suspect that if GOG decided to flex it's legal muscles, it could sue him for something as inane as disassembling the installer.

Like you said, they didn't comment so it might be that GOG doesn't care however.

That being said, the situation might get more complication if once installer components are adapted for Linux, the modders try to distribute them, unless they distribute a script that does the unpacking, modifications and creation of some installation script/executable for Linux.

However, it could be that if people start to distribute executables or scripts that freely modify GOGs installation scripts, they might feel compelled to move in and defend the copyrights of their installation scripts not so much to thwart this attempt, but to better protect themselves from potentially more serious copyright infringements.

This is absolutely not a case of reverse engineering in the slightest and is no more illegal than opening a .zip file. There are already legal tools available that allow you to unpack installers like this and have been for years, such as innoup, mentioned in the second post of the thread and the basis for this project. Sean is simply proposing a port of innoup that would extract the files from the installer on a Linux machine. Innoup is completely open source, so there is also nothing illegal there. A person would still need to legally obtain the game from GOG in order to use the innoup port on the installer, so again, nothing illegal there. No decompiling of code, no modifying of game executables or assets, simply extracting the files from the installer, which is what the installer itself would be doing anyway... nothing illegal there. If GOG were to decide to "flex their legal muscles", the courts would punch them in the face for being stupid.

Ok, so let's put aside the argument as to whether unpacking the installer outside of installation is legal or not for a second.

Let's assume it's perfectly legal and dandy.

Then what?

In order to "port" the game to Linux, you still need to modify the installation scripts.

How do you distribute that?

1) Distribute the modified installer

Definitely not legal.

2) Distribute a tool that unpacks your installer, ports the files and create a new Linux one

Better than the above, but of questionable legality (if their installation file are copyrighted, then you are distributing software that freely modifies copyrighted material... I seriously doubt that's legal)

3) You tell users how to modify all the scripts to port the installer

That's a lot less user friendly to begin with.

And I'm still not sure it's more legal than 2 (again, instead of doing it for them, you are encouraging users to modify copyrighted material and telling them how).