I just got a refurbished dual-boot dos/win95 pentium pc with about 2gb on a two partitioned hardrive because I like to play on real hardware with a real crt monitor.

One of my hopes was to take iso files from my dosbox games to burn.

Unfortunately, I hit a road block because games like Carmageddon, Tex Murphy games, and Phantasmagoria don't mount separate iso files rather all the files are put into one folder and the folders are mounted as discs for some reason rather than iso files.

This really disappoints me because I knew I couldn't do it to win games but I, atleast, thought I could burn iso files of dos games only to find out that I'm running into a bunch a problems.

I knew Philscomputerlab had some tutorials on how to find iso files and burn them to a cd, but this doesn't address files that required multiple cds with a limit of about 600mb.

I don't wanna have to go the... you know... ABANDONWARE route but it seems they leave very little choice.

So... COULD YOU... GOG PLEASE... PROVIDE ISO VERSIONS OF VIRTUALLY EVERY GAME FROM ABOUT 1990-2005 OR SO?

I Really appreciate the service you provide(in fact, I own about 150 dos games I bought on this store) and would like to know if you could somehow address this issue or ask publishers to, atleast allow us to download iso files from other sources as long as we own... I mean are licensed, versions of games we've already bought on gog?

Or could somebody show a more thorough way to create these types iso files?

Thanks!!!

You could probably burn the correct files to a CD, but it probably needs some fiddling with the configuration files.

I wouldn't feel bad about this if you've already bought or own legal copies, especially recently-bought copies from GOG, Steam, etc.

I wouldn't get my hopes up of GOG doing adding ISOs because of time needed, legal issues, etc. GOG focuses on games that run on current machines, not original hardware.

But what blotunga said may also apply. You could ask around on the game-specific forums.

Or what about contacting Phil directly with your question about multiple CDs?

sadly wont happen as it will mean a lot of extra work for gog with 0 profit connected to the given work. My estimate is that tops only 0,1% of the customers would have an extra use for the provided isos and creating them and hosting them will cost a lot of time and money.

We already told Gog, but they'll never do it, sadly :(

Why?

Windows 95 has USB support. (If you ever got that version, anyway.)

In fact, if you're using Windows 95, that was your first mistake. Use Windows 98 SE or 2000.

There are even USB Mass Storage drivers for DOS.

Yeah, but the thing about DOS is that it couldn't run the GOG installers anyway. :V

DOS games can be installed on a compatible OS and will most likely work on the DOS machine if just copied over. There are some that use a minimal disc image, but apparently there is a replacement for MSCDEX that includes image mounting.

Some games already have disk images. Quake The Offering for example have *.GOG files which are actually BIN.

Most (if not all) games that are set up like that have an image containing minimal data to save space, as the image is only used to satisfy a disc check. Any audio tracks have most likely also been extracted and compressed to MP3 or Vorbis, again, to save space.

Now that you bring it up, "why" indeed. Why dual-boot DOS and Windows 95, when Windows 95 can already be rebooted into DOS mode?

Not in the case of that particular game -- see here.

Found this thread thinking about this myself today...

I've been building an old DOS pc as well as delving into PCEm style emulation lately, and I've been sad to realise that a lot of old games - while thankfully now finally available on places like GOG (anyone remember when stuff like Sierra's adventures were *only* obtainable from abandonware sites or ebay?) - it is *very* hard to find pure disk images, cd or (even harder) floppy!

This makes some games difficult to impossible to play on original hardware, and also means that many are not being preserved properly, with original dos installers, drivers, etc. that are not needed on modern OSes now stripped out before bundling for sale.

Like the OP, I've had to occasionally turn to abandonware sites for games I've long owned simply because my original disks are dead and GOG either sells them in "stripped" form (no installers, etc.) or not at all.

Here's the thing: I have a large collection of original games, floppy and CD, and while I'm sure that sadly a lot of the floppies are dead, I'd be more than happy to freely donate 1:1 disk images of *any* of them to GOG so they can bundle them as extras/"goodies" with the games they sell. The same goes for manuals, as I have a lot in storage that are historically interesting. I'm not sure how I'd initiate that, but I'd be honored to help preserve an important part of gaming history.

OP, I know it's been awhile, but if you need help in creating ISOs/images of your own games, feel free to message me and I'd be happy to help.