...Forth? Wow. I wonder how much code change was necessary between the various systems. It's hard to imagine a Megadrive Forth compiler, but then again, the game was on several other M68k systems so maybe it wasn't as hard...
It is really, really easy to write a Forth interpreter (You can write a simple one in an afternoon). It's often the first software written for an architecture. The structure of Forth means that the hardware-dependent parts are contained in a small number of words (sort of like functions in other languages but not exactly). Forth can be implemented on tiny microcontrollers; a Megadrive would be luxury.
It's.. not a compiler (besides I had Forth on my C64). Maybe one can call it a translator to ad-hoc bytecode. I also had USCD Pascal on that C64 which translated to bytecode. This was more JVM-like. So nothing hard about it.
Forth is a compiler but what it "compiles" is not standard. The implementor decides what they need.
Forth can compile pointers to native code that are the VM's instructions, called direct threading.
Forth can compile pointers to pointers to native code VM instructions, called indirect threading.
Forth can compile byte code like OpenFirmware/OpenBoot.
And modern systems compile optimized native code (VFX Forth, SwiftForth) but still remain fully interactive at the console.
Point of information: By and large FORTHs did not use bytecode. Execution tokens (XTs) were usually stored as a function of the default word size, which typically was 16 bits. There were some FORTHs that went out of their way to use token threading so they could store programs in byte codes, but those were pretty rare. Rarer still were programs that mixed byte code with word-sized code (although one such scheme is described in an issue of Forth Dimensions).
That is true, furthermore Overload has an usermade campaign called Overload: First Strike, which is a conversion and upgrade of the entire Descent 1 campaign to Overload. Additionally I recommend Desecrators, which is a Descent-like with procedurally generated maps. Think Sublevel Zero or Everspace, except good.
Extremely easy to convince population that state X is an evil, looming threat if state X is actually doing evil, looming, and threatening things for decades on no end.
Russia could have stopped at any moment. Can still stop at any moment. They could have single-handedly undermined Europe's trust in the States, years before the orange-in-charge did, merely by not starting an invasion. Their choice. Their FA, now they FO.
Everyone knows they are evil. Not that many states out there fly to other side of the planet to bomb someone irrelevant or outright kidnap president of the country they are not even have a boarder with.
Many games with multiplayer features require Galaxy for those multiplayer features. You can consider this DRM-equivalent if you want. However, every singleplayer game on GOG will work without Galaxy installed, and that singleplayer gameplay will be completely DRM-free in every possible way. (That's at least 99.6% of the games on GOG, but eyeballing the 22 games which don't specify that they're singleplayer games, most of them simply have incomplete metadata, so it's really 99.9% of them.)
Off the top of my head Crime Cities on launch forced me to use Galaxy to play it. I vividly remember this because the game also ran like complete crap.
Galaxy can be required for multiplayer aspects in games, but if what you say is true for the singleplayer part of the game, GOG will consider it a bug, and will get it fixed.
There's nothing in the Crime Cities GOG forum about this, nor in the various tracking threads in the main forum, and generally GOG users are extremely sensitive about anything which even reeks of forcing Galaxy, so I'd strongly expect any issue to be known.
I've seen cases where the developer implemented a bad online check, so that if you blocked the program from accessing the internet while the OS reported being online, the game would hang or crash, but being fully offline would work. Could it be that something like that was at play here? Oh, or that you simply picked the wrong installer for the game, and thus ran the Galaxy-installer rather than the offline installer?
I think too it can be misleading since on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE (which works entirely without Galaxy and how I run games).
They do this to push Galaxy for convenience I suppose as most are used to clients that handle updates but it can be confusing if some wonder why for instance their offline installer shortcut opened Galaxy instead.
If the wine experience is anything to go by, if you don't have Galaxy installed at all, the shortcuts will also just point to the .exe - but yeah, I suspect it must be something like this.
> on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE
I had Crime Cities lying around since it was a freebie on GOG many years ago, so I just went ahead and installed it using vanilla wine. There was absolutely no Galaxy requirement for installing or playing the single player part of the game.
Remind everyone, which party was blocking this support for as long as possible, with a hole lot of media circus and scaremongering?
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