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General discussion (archive)Legal stuff regarding DOS games(21 posts)solved(21 posts)solved
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This is my favourite topic
Posted January 06, 2014
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ussnorway: Technically no its not… the problem is that removing the dos-box would be considered hacking the game to remove its copy wright restrictions and that normally requires you to have a transcribed (very legally worded) agreement which spells out exactly what is happening with the game.

In practise, nobody gives a lollypop what you do in your own home with a game that you have legally purchased unless that somehow leads to other people playing the game without paying for it i.e. if you post an article at the local school which spells out how you bypassed the code and got it to work THEN yes you could indeed find some suits knocking on your front door.
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pimpmonkey2382: I may be reading this incorrectly, but dosbox doesn't add any sort of DRM.
No dosbox is not the issue... the original game does have copyright protection and gog has a licence to sell it without some of that code but the original game code (as a whole) is still legally considered the standard for what is and is not counted.

Removing the dos-box code from a gog install which then somehow finds its way into becoming publicly accessible would be ruled as hacking by most judges… considering the prudence it sets I guarantee you will find the judge that gets assigned is bias against you.
Posted January 06, 2014
Game code, and the game itself are two different things, he can strip dosbox and still have the game basically just as gog.com released it.
Posted January 06, 2014
Some GOG.com releases need a bit of tinkering to use on real DOS, e.g. burning a CD image to a real CD for games that need the disc; see Mau1wurf1977's Installing GOG.com games on your MS-DOS Time-Machine series for details.
Post edited January 06, 2014 by Arkose
Posted January 07, 2014
I'm late to the party, as usual, and here's my take:

a) you're not forced to use all of the package that you bought from gOg (okay, from the license you bought). Example: in Gothic II, the Night of the Raven add-on is an optional installation. A bunch of other games have optional add-ons that change the game. To me, this signifies that you're not required to use the game package in its entirety.

b) gOg itself has promoted the modification of the games sold here; most notable to me is the Baldur's Gate games. The mod in question (actually several mods in one process) allows you to essentially merge the two games into one package so you can use the guts of BG2 to play BG1. In effect, this is akin to what you're asking: changing the manner in which the game is launched. However, for BG this goes much beyond what you're asking: simply changing the shortcut so it points straight to the exe instead of a batch file that launches a game under DOSBox.

c) for the noCD stuff, I'm fairly certain I've seen gOg staff post fix-it instructions for this or that game in order to get around those error messages when launching a game. I might be mistaken on this; however, there are a bunch of community-fixes for this error that gOg staff let live in the forums.

So yeah, you're good.
Posted January 08, 2014
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alexnerd: Hi everyone! I've asked GOG staff about this, but they're still keeping silence for some reason). I'm a lucky owner of 486DX4 PC, so I don't need any of them DOSboxes for sure. So there's a question: is it legal to delete all DOSbox- (and maybe GOG-related) stuff from installation (Duke Nukem 3D for example), repack it and store as zip-archive in my PC gaming base? Thank you!
That should be fine legfally; I would note that some of the games have fixes that apply to modern computers, so getting them to run may actually require a little tweaking on your end. And, sadly, we don't support Win95 / Dos 8.0 on GOG, so you'll be on your own. :)
Posted January 08, 2014

That should be fine legfally; I would note that some of the games have fixes that apply to modern computers, so getting them to run may actually require a little tweaking on your end.
My sincere appreciation! It gives me a green light to buy more MS-DOS antiques :)
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General discussion (archive)Legal stuff regarding DOS games(21 posts)solved(21 posts)solved
(21 posts)solved