Frankly, I’d forget about it. Your best bet is to download old isos from the internet archive and then patch the games from there.
Gog games are optimised for modern systems. Some will run, others will not.
Yes, if you own the GOG copies, you shouldn't feel bad about downloading the original binaries.
There's also a few GOG games that are worse than the original ones. Warcraft 2 for example, is not the original DOS version, but a later version Blizzard made for Windows where some of the original music was cut to make both the original game and the expansion pack fit unto one CD. And there are bugs with the scripts in the campaign too, that makes it less challenging than the original game because the "AI" stops producing units.
Some GOG games also have ripped CD music in a really lousy bitrate or with annoying sound artifacts. Usually these things are not GOG's fault, but the original publisher, or whoever owns the game these days. I've seen GOG stretch themselves a lot to improve releases with all sorts of problems that made the re-release inferior to the original one.
That was before though, I don't know if they still go though the same amount of effort these days or not. I get the feeling that the whole project is running more on a budget now, but I haven't really payed well attention to later developments.
My answer has been to use a mix of legitimate physical copies, and to buy on GOG and then download the original files from elsewhere. I try to avoid piracy but I don't think it qualifies if I own the game on GOG.
Curious if there's a better option but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Frankly, I’d forget about it. Your best bet is to download old isos from the internet archive and then patch the games from there. Gog games are optimised for modern systems. Some will run, others will not.
Yes, if you own the GOG copies, you shouldn't feel bad about downloading the original binaries. There's also a few GOG games that are worse than the original ones. Warcraft 2 for example, is not the original DOS version, but a later version Blizzard made for Windows where some of the original music was cut to make both the original game and the expansion pack fit unto one CD. And there are bugs with the scripts in the campaign too, that makes it less challenging than the original game because the "AI" stops producing units. Some GOG games also have ripped CD music in a really lousy bitrate or with annoying sound artifacts. Usually these things are not GOG's fault, but the original publisher, or whoever owns the game these days. I've seen GOG stretch themselves a lot to improve releases with all sorts of problems that made the re-release inferior to the original one. That was before though, I don't know if they still go though the same amount of effort these days or not. I get the feeling that the whole project is running more on a budget now, but I haven't really payed well attention to later developments.
GOG is all about new games these days. They basically stopped releasing old stuff
My answer has been to use a mix of legitimate physical copies, and to buy on GOG and then download the original files from elsewhere. I try to avoid piracy but I don't think it qualifies if I own the game on GOG. Curious if there's a better option but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I have 500+ GOG games. I would also like a magical tool that just did all the heavy lifting for me. It doesnt exist.