weapon is the DOS emulator
DOSBox. One of its core developers,
Peter ‘Qbix’ Veenstra, frequently
helps out.
Marcin Paczynski: Most of the time all
we get is email with a title and a contact
person, and that’s basically it. With
Harvester there were a lot of issues with
how its movies are displayed. Qbix was
helping us but we couldn’t find the
correct codec. It was randomly
happening across the whole game, and
every time a tester came up to a new
problem, we’d try a different codec and
have to start the game all over again.
Even the last outro movie went wrong,
so we needed to go back to square one
right at the end.Manygamesdon’tworkperfectlyin
vanillaDOSBox.GOGhastofiddle
withmanysettings,includingscaling,
controllersetupsandCPUcycles,
sometimeshavingtodynamicallyset
thembecausedifferentpartsofa
gamebehavedifferently.
MarcinPaczynski:ForThemeParkwe
hadtoaskQbixtocreatea separate
branchofDOSBox.Thegamewasall
overtheplace,it didn’tworkatall.The
biggestproblemwaswithmemory
allocation.Wehadpreviousproblems
withRealmsofArkania, wherethelast
bosswasbasicallyunbeatablebecause
ofthememoryallocationissue.But
therearegamesthataremuchmoreMarta Adamska: Indiana Jones and
the Infernal Machine was completely
not compatible with new operating
systems, and our product team had to
rebuild it to make it run on Win 7, 8 and
10... without having the source code. We
actually added cloud saves to that one
as well, so it’s a fairly modern
experience now.
Marcin Paczynski: One of the
problems we had with Indiana Jones
and the Infernal Machine, and this is one
of the reasons we do full playthroughs
from beginning to the end, was that at
the very end, an elevator that’s
supposed to take the player to the nextdifficult, and those are the early
Windows games. Here is where we have
the majority of the fun, so to speak.After all, before DirectX 9 was
released in 2002, there were few
standards for PC.
Marcin Paczynski: A game is like a
Pandora’s box. You open it and it can be
all over the place. When we first
launched Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the
Sith, the game is 3D but the land was 2D
and there were no textures. Everything
was white. It was unplayable. It can take
a couple of months to be able to release
those games.10 Years of GOG
FEATURE
Theme Park required
a separate branch of
DOSBox to work.